As Jim Geraghty points out, people far and wide (and not just on the right, mind you) have been having enormous sport with Virginia Heffernan’s Wired profile of the inestimable Pete Buttigieg, a hero not only in his own mind but apparently the author’s as well. I genuinely ask you, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys ironic meta-humor, to set aside the ten minutes or so it takes to read this thing — and believe me I don’t normally post on the Corner to ask people to go read pieces in Wired magazine.

I also have to point out that, aside from arguing over which of us got to write about this thing (the inevitable answer: all of us), the primary question internally here at National Review was, “Is this meant seriously? Surely she’s mocking America’s most over-promoted consultant, no?”

She is not! The author, I remind America, wrote an infamous Los Angeles Times piece about her deeply enraged reaction to having her driveway plowed for free, after a massive snowstorm, by her Trump-supporting neighbors. Must I feel grateful to these horrible people? (“How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?” She’s kidding-not-kidding, as the rest of the piece makes grotesquely clear.) So on the question of the Buttigieg piece’s sincerity, that settled the argument for us here on staff.

Anyway, the piece works well read either sincerely or as a Jonathan Swift–like Modest Proposal. I commend it to you in no small part because it not only serves as comedy fodder in its own right but also reveals the essential hollowness of Pete Buttigieg, that mere hologram of actual achievement.