So, there you have it. A buffoonish cretin with an absurd vaudeville moustache announces something baffoonishly cretinous and, lo and behold, the world’s media can’t get enough of him, or of drowning in smug outrage over how cretinous and buffoonish etc.

But to shrug the media orgy off under the  “what do you expect, this is the media we deserve” file would be to give the circus an easy ride (so to speak). The glee with which the event, and all its disastrous reverberations, are being anticipated borders on the morbid, not to say pornographic.

To the clear disappointment (and it seems further “outrage”) of many a journalist, Terry Jones, the Florida “pastor”, has now “suspended” his event, claiming he’s had a conversation with those in charge of the Cordoba House building project (or “Ground Zero Mosque” to the spatially-challenged and illiterate) who had promised him to move the location of their planned site. Cordoba House spokespeople said they’d never spoken to Jones.

Obama calls the planned action a recruitment “Bonanza” for Al Quaeda, rightly judging any arguments based on anything other than pure self-interest to be unlikely to garner any traction. (To call Tony Blair’s own announcement of outrage a wooden hypocrisy would be an insult to trees and furniture.) Now, an Afghan protester is dead and others injured; nothing new of course for these are not only expected but, one could argue, the very developments that had been hoped for to make the story “fit” the standard news media template.

Now, the narrative arc is reaching its apotheosis and the final act is upon us. Of course, whatever Jones ends up burning, it won’t be Qurans. None of the hundreds of Journalists who have met him has bothered to tell him he’ll be burning translations which are, not only considered mere human efforts at rendering the original text but are, in any case, probably semi-authorised versions not recognized by any ‘extremists’. In other words, he’ll be saving them the effort.