UPDATED 19/6: What's wrong with this picture?

Walt has been trying desperately to ignore this "story", as well as that of the Dirty Duggar, because to me, these things are not "news", not of the slightest importance to the future of our country, our world or anything else that really matters. They are yet another example of the lamestream media's pandering to the bizarre American fascination with "celebrities" -- people like the Kardashians who are famous for being famous.

Yet I keep seeing "stories" and even op-ed pieces with titles like "Caitlyn Jenner is a woman and deserves to be described as such" (posted by the Groan and Wail's Pubic Editor). This, we're told, is the most important and newsworthy issue of a week in which more 1000s of "refugees" crossed the Med in leaky boats, Russia threatened war against the Ukraine, and [Ed., please fill in some more news stories here.]

Because I refuse to read or listen to any of this rubbish about the poster-boy -- poster-girl? -- for the sex-change-is-normal movement, I don't know if Bruce or Caitlyn has actually had the operation, or is still in the pre-op stage which we used to call cross-dressing. And you know what? I don't care! Really!!!

The point is argued by Andrew O'Hehir in "The Duggars and Caitlyn Jenner are the “real news”: The reality that the Hillary Clinton media spectacle wishes desperately that you’d ignore", from which the photo above was ripped. He writes:

Caitlyn Jenner and the Duggar family speak to America’s changing sense of itself, and to the shifting fronts in the “cultural war” that Pat Buchanan invoked in his famous speech in the Houston Astrodome, 23 years ago. They are in fact the substance of our national conversation, the central narrative of American political and cultural life in our time. What happens inside the Beltway is a footnote, if that.

If Mr. O'Hehir is right, as I fear, God save the United States of America!

Final word to Mark Steyn: "In the future there will be no men whatsoever. There will be girls with vaginas and girls with penises."

Footnote and book recommendation: If you're not sure what Pat Buchanan said at the Republican convention in Houston and why it shifted the focus of American conservatism from economics and finance (where it belongs) to the culture wars, read David Frum's Dead Right, "a witty and opinionated tour through the chaos of post-Reagan conservatism".

UPDATE: Further reading: "Race and gender: I feel therefore I am", by one of Walt's favourites, Margaret Wente, in the Globe and Mail 19/6/2015.