Hesiod on the Burk matter:

It doesn't MATTER whether Burk's article was satirical or earnest! It's been a deliberate, ad hominem distraction from the beginning. An effort to discredit her, without having to address the merits of the Augusta National issue.

This is a common propganda technique of the right: When they can't win an argument on the merits, they create a controversy about some irrelevant side issue in order to distract everyone from the original problem.

Refuse to play the game on their terms.

To be honest, I disagree. As Doug Turnbull pointed out on this very site, Augusta is in many respects simply a sideshow. The real issue here is the very same tactic that Hesiod is referring to: the attempts to lie, prevaricate, obfuscate, or distract that characterize the right's attempts to win arguments.

Case in point:

There are other writings by academic feminists calling for the elimination of men and similar absurdities in dead earnest, though at nearly midnight I'm not going to run them down. But as a guy who once edited Catharine MacKinnon, I know a bit about this stuff.

That was Instapundit, and if you get up close to the post and take a sniff, you can probably identify the region from whence he pulled out this bald-faced assertion. The "Perfessor" has been arguing for months now that a double standard exists where the left can say things that the right can't, and has provided precious little reason to believe him outside of a few choice anecdotes ("the plural of anecdote is not data") blown wildly out of proportion and endless applications of the Big Lie technique. After all, if you repeat assertions like this:

a conscious or unconscious effort to dodge the real issue, a double standard about speech that everyone knows exists, but that the left dare not admit -- because its whole existence depends on both the double standard, and not admitting it.

..over and over and over again, assertions that most of your audience really, really wants to believe anyway, it can work wonders for redefining reality in their minds. After that, cognitive dissonance sets in, and trying to dissuade them from a notion that they've invested so much of themselves in is an exercise in futility. (Witness Dittoheads.)

Maybe that's the problem with the left in the U.S. nowadays. They just examine post-modernism. The right actually applies it.