You could almost see the smile on Arizona Sen. John McCain's face as he used the Web site Twitter.com in recent days to tick off lists of pork packed like sausage links into a $410 billion congressional spending package.

Twitter is an Internet craze that puts all Americans, regardless of rank, on the same ballroom floor in the world's largest social mixer. I go there to let my "followers" know when I have a new blog post or a column. The Arizona senator, who last November was a few electoral votes shy of the world's most powerful man, in turn lets me and the rest of his "followers" know virtually every move he makes. He calls it his "new found love of twittering" from his Blackberry.

And so, on Feb. 27 at 7:40 a.m., he let us know he was "heading to the floor." One assumes he meant the floor of the Senate and was not quickly texting to let us know he had tripped and was falling. One hour and 10 minutes later, he resumed what he had started early that morning — a whimsical top 10 list of the piggiest of the pork.

"$200,000 'tattoo removal violence outreach program' to could (sic) help gang members or others shed visible signs of their past — REALLY?" Then came, "$300,000 for the Montana World Trade Center — enough said."

And then this little gem, "$1 million for Mormon cricket control in Utah — is that the species of cricket or a game played by the Brits?"

McCain, as most Americans must know by now, has a laugh to punctuate sentences like that. It's not the kind of nervous giggle a lot of people use as verbal periods. His is an exclamation mark meant to say, "Isn't it self-evident how right I am and how foolish other people are?"

Well ... never criticize another's earmark until you've walked a mile in his moccasins over Mormon crickets that line the roads at several hundred million to an acre.

And there you have the dilemma of earmarks in a nutshell (the harvesting of which probably has an earmark, as well). Talk to just about any senator or representative about the ones in his or her district, and you'll get a compelling argument. What you won't get, however, is an intelligent, compelling debate on the matter in Congress. And that — not McCain's pithy comments about things he doesn't understand — is the real danger with congressional pork. It all comes stuffed into one convenient, unexamined package.