A very important post about… Britney Spears

I’m sorry, I just haven’t been able to focus today because of Britney Spears’ marriage/annulment. What could explain this sort of tabloid celebrity behavior by such a… celebrity? I think it was that Christina Aguilera. According to the Associated Press:

[Spears] relates a story about seeing Aguilera, her former friend and fellow Mouseketeer, for the first time in two years: “She comes up to me in a club in front of all these people and tries to put her tongue down my throat! “I say, ‘It’s good to see you,’ and she goes, ‘Well, you’re not being real with me.’ I was like, ‘Well, Christina, what’s your definition of real? Going up to girls and kissing them after you haven’t seen them for two years?’

That and a liplock from Madonna? You can witness the bad morals spreading from mouth to mouth! More seriously, Entertainment Weekly (subscription required) had a great November cover story — that’s the cover above — that chronicled the beginning of Mariah Carey-like behavior. One section:

[E]ver since her breakup last year with first love Justin Timberlake (who later cast a Britney look-alike in a none-too-flattering role for his ”Cry Me a River” video), and that much-publicized but never-materialized yearlong hiatus she promised to take, there have been plenty of highly visible symptoms. Like her tear earlier this year through virtually half the nightclubs in New York (where she couldn’t even light up a cigarette without tabloids making a huge fuss). Those rumors of a fling with the balding 32-year-old Limp Bizkit singer Fred Durst were pretty shocking too. (Durst went on ”Howard Stern” and gallantly described Spears’ pubic region to millions of listeners.) Add to all that the legitimate anxiety over her musical staying power. And throw in all the other stresses and strains of being the world’s most scrutinized 21-year-old pop star — the grueling video shoots, the countless interviews, the big-dollar endorsements, the endless grind of disrobing for magazine covers, not to mention the hurtful backlash from conservative Brit-haters like Kendel Ehrlich, the governor of Maryland’s wife, who announced her desire to ”shoot” Spears (while speaking at a domestic-violence conference, of all places) — and it’s easy to see why the poor girl got the flu. ”She probably needs to get laid,” Spears says, rolling her eyes, when asked about that trigger-happy governor’s wife. ”These parents, they think I’m a role model for their kids, that their kids look at me as some sort of idol. But it’s the parents’ job to make sure their kids don’t turn out that shallow. It’s the parents who should be teaching their kids how to behave. That’s not my responsibility. I’m not responsible for your kid.”

Even more seriously, Andrew Sullivan notes:

[C]an you not see how something like Britney Spears’ insta-marriage in Las Vegas might infuriate long-committed gay couples who, even now, don’t have a shred of the rights Ms Spears enjoyed for a few days? It is one thing for people to declare their commitment to traditional marriage – i.e. procreative, life-long, heterosexual. It is another thing when that ideal has almost no relationship to civil marriage as it now exists for straights; and when it is nevertheless used to deny gay people access to the institution. Over the holidays, I found myself watching all those VH1 list shows, and happened across the top ten or twenty (I forget which) shortest Hollywood marriages in history. Ha ha ha. We live a world in which Britney Spears just engaged in something “sacred” (in the president’s words), where instant and joke hetero marriages and divorces are a subject of titillation, and where a decades-long monogamous lesbian marriage is a threat to civilization as we know it. Please.

I wonder if Britney is still Karl Rove’s dream voter. UPDATE: Scrappleface has more. And since Instapundit says this is “the only Britney Spears wedding post you need to read,” I’ll also link to the Smoking Gun, which has Spears’ annulment papers.