So it took three days for some incensed housewife in Tennessee to file suit against Janet Jackson, Justin Timberlake, and Viacom. This is less time than it took a host of pundits to censure the new “axis of corruption”, but the wheels of justice do grind slowly. It’s ironic to see the Wall Street Journal, Fox News, and other bastions of the respectable Right leading the charge against Viacom and CBS, who can’t exactly be dimissed as corrupting leftists— after all, they refused to air moveon.org’s anti-Bush commercial.

Boobies aside, I’m amused. The right in America is a strange, unholy marriage between social conservatives and free market liberals, who really have no business in bed together. As a lover of liberty too disillusioned to use the word “libertarian”, I take a certain sick pleasure in seeing this particular relationship show signs of cracking up. Social conservatives—and I have plenty of experience with them—rarely give much thought to economics. Providing for a family, however, requires at least some level of belief in individual responsibility. Any belief in individualism tends to go along with free markets, which is probably the only reason the Republican party works.

So it is only just desserts that socialists of the conservative variety should find themselves so shocked by the Super Bowl, because it’s nearly inevitable that a market system in which the labor of entertainment is divided and aggregated into massive entities like Viacom is going to produce “outrageous content”. Hell, Big Macs classify as “outrageous content” in my book.

But then, McDonald’s is getting sued for making disgusting hamburgers: I should pick better examples.