Chris Bowers has the best take on the significance of the Paris Hilton anti-McCain ad I've seen so far.

...it appears McCain made a major miscalculation with his celebrity attack ad. Hilton's response is now the top story on Google News, and apparently the McCain campaign is receiving so many media requests about it, that they had to post a from response on their website. They have gotten into a spat with Paris Hilton, which there is basically no way to win. Hilton has nothing to lose, and the back and forth just highlights the frivolic idiocy of McCain's recent attacks.

It's been about a year since I had anything nice at all to say about Paris Hilton, and no one is more surprised than me to find we're here again: Paris Hilton strikes back with viral anti-McCain ad.

The most disturbing part of this entire Paris Hilton prison debacle is not, as previously suspected, that it has forced me to sympathize with Paris Hilton, but rather that it has now forced me to link approvingly to Christopher Hitchens, who only just last night I was calling "a nasty, useful idiot for the neo-cons."

And now here I go, clearing my throat as above before deciding to do something I would have never believed I would do, and choosing to write about Paris Hilton. Choosing to write about her, furthermore, not just as if she were some metaphor or signifier, but as a subject in herself. At some point toward the middle of last Friday, it seemed to me, one was being made a spectator to a small but important injustice. Those gloating and jeering headlines, showing a tearful child being hauled back to jail, had the effect of making me feel sick. So, you finally got the kid to weep on camera? Are you happy now?

It's true, as Ezra Klein says, that the release of Paris Hilton from prison after only three days puts the lie to any pretense of class equality in America—but I would hope that we might also take this moment to ask what the point of prison is supposed to be again.

What this debacle really exposes is not unfairness of Hilton "weaseling out" of "serving her time" but the vacuity of prison as a response to nonviolent antisocial behavior. I don't want to send her back, I want to let the others out.

For the observation that prison fails to eliminate crime, one should perhaps substitute the hypothesis that prison has succeeded extremely well in producing delinquency, a specific type, a politically or economically less dangerous—and, on occasion, usable—form of illegality; in producing delinquents, in an apparently marginal, but in fact centrally supervised milieu; in producing the delinquent as a pathologized subject. The success of the prison, in the struggles around the law and illegalities, has been to specify a "delinquency." We have seen how the carceral system substituted the "delinquent" for the offender, and also superimposed upon judicial practice a whole horizon of possible knowledge. Now this process that constitutes delinquency as an object of knowledge is one with the political operation that disassociates illegalities and isolates delinquency from them. The prison is the hinge of these two mechanisms; it enables them to reinforce one another perpetually, to objectify the delinquency behind the offense, to solidify delinquency in the movement of illegalities. So successful has the prison been that, after a century and a half of "failures," the prison still exists, producing the same results, and there is the greatest reluctance to dispose with it.

—Foucault, Discipline & Punish