John Edwards has ended his run for the presidency, and considering that he’s now 0-for2 in nomination at-bats, it’s unlikely he’ll undertake a third trip to the plate. (How’s that for a baseball/politics metaphor?) In short, there’s no chance he’ll ever be Bubba One, or whatever might be the Secret Service codename for Southern-born presidents.

But enough about him. Let’s talk about me – specifically, about the fact that I now have to look for real work.

There will be no job for me, or anyone else, in an Edwards administration. While I realize that I hadn’t done any heavy lifting on Edwards’ behalf to earn something like a Cabinet post – I was thinking of a cushy job along the lines of ambassador to Barbados – there were many local people who worked hard and diligently on his behalf. They’re now getting the same thing I’m getting: a steamin’ pile of squat.

Actually, the people who worked on Edwards’ campaign all have serious liberal/Democratic credentials and could have made a strong case for some kind of job. Me? Well, I would have been a tougher sell.

I had too much fun with Edwards’ $400 haircuts, for instance. And when the Wall Street Journal reported that the champion of the little man had invested in, and drawn a fat paycheck from, a New York hedge fund that was foreclosing on the homes of Hurricane Katrina survivors, I likened his situation to that of a family-values Republican being caught boinking outside the sanctity of his marital bed. Worst of all, I once wrote that the fact that Edwards built a new, multimillion-dollar home in Chapel Hill (and thus employing a significant number of tradespeople) suggested that he must secretly believe in the conservative principle of trickle-down economics.

Any one of those ill-advised observations could have scuttled my chances to serve. Still, I clung to hope all along. I told myself that Edwards would come to appreciate my independent thinking. That he would see the value of having somebody around who wasn’t a yes-man. That someday, the phone would ring and I’d hear Edwards say, “I need a man like you in Barbados. Can I count on you?”

You could have, Johnny. And if you don’t mind, maybe you could pass my name on to Hillary.

If you already know about Corey, then you surely want to slap him. I’ll hook you up with that opportunity in a minute, but meanwhile let me explain about him to everyone else.

Corey is a 16-year-old lout in Australia who held a big party at his house one night a few weeks ago when his parents were out of town. In his case, “big” is an absolute, rather than relative, term: 500 people attended the event, which grew so rowdy that police officers who sought to quell the disturbance were sent running for safety when their vehicles were attacked. By the time the property damage was totaled, the bill came to $20,000. The parents, naturally, are on the hook.

But that’s not what made Corey a global news figure. That came only with the insolence and lack of contrition he put on display for TV reporters. That, and the stupid yellow sunglasses he refused to take off. (His initial TV interview can be found here, while this short clip shows a radio announcer trying to remove Corey’s shades — which I’ll bet is the most most common impulse among adults, after backhanding the smirking punk.)

For the past couple of weeks, Australian newspapers have offered updates on Corey’s fate on a near-daily basis. For a while, he simply avoided his parents, hanging out at the beach and claiming he was already planning his next party. He eventually went home, and then — apparently with his parents’ consent — signed on to become a professional party planner. All the while, he reveled in the fact that he’d not only dodged any consequence to his defiance, but has actually profited from it.

To a certain slice of the world’s population, Corey is a folk hero. But for the rest of us, he’s just a youngster who needs a good …

Well, I promised you the opportunity. Go here and slap to your heart’s content.

There are a number of things that can get my knickers twisted, but newspaper comic strips aren’t among them. That apparently puts me in a distinct minority of newspaper-reading citizens.

My local paper revamped its comic section twice in the past year — once to cut some tired, dated strips in favor of newer, edgier ones, then a second time to shoehorn the discontinued strips back into the paper when it became clear they had vocal constituencies. But readers continue to quibble over some of the editors’ decisions, most notably the choice to put “Mallard Fillmore” on the comics page while keeping “Doonesbury” on the editorial page.

If there was a look of puzzlement and confusion on your face as you read that sentence directly above, it’s understandable. Could any other issue show up as a brighter blip on the radar of the inconsequential? Do people really care about such things?

Yeah, buddy, they care. The paper’s public editor, whose job (when boiled down to its essence) it is to accept phone calls from any aggrieved reader who’s worn out his or her welcome  with the actual decision-makers, devoted his most recent weekly column to refereeing the matter.

There’s more to this argument than simple placement of a comic strip, however. Consider this question from a reader, sent to the public editor: “Why is ‘Doonesbury’ still hiding out on the editorial page while you allow the egregious ‘Mallard Fillmore’ to mingle with the other cartoons?” You can’t take that question at face value. For starters, “Doonesbury isn’t hiding on the editorial page; it occupies prime real estate, and benefits from not being jammed onto a comics page that is already too crowded. Also, you don’t have to have a particularly sophisticated grasp of nuance to seize on the word “egregious.” That reader wasn’t asking why “Mallard Fillmore” isn’t on the editorial page. He was asking why it’s in the paper at all.

And thus we come to the true crux of the matter. This isn’t about comics. It’s just one more skirmish in the great cultural struggle that has continued for decades. There’s an ideological tit-for-tat that has gone on for so long that few of us even remember the original offenses. Let’s see, did I hound the Dixie Chicks off the radio because Ann Coulter was heckled off a campus stage somewhere? Did I organize a boycott of “The Passion of the Christ” because Jesse Helms sought to eliminate federal grants to controversial artists? Ah, it doesn’t matter. If the other side’s gonna do it, so am I. Two can play this game.

But when you perpetuate the endless struggle, you eventually reach that point of reductio ad absurdum. If you want to know when you’ve gotten there, it’ll be when you find yourself making the serious argument that society will be much improved if a particular comic strip gets the bum’s rush from the paper.