Jumping the Shark: and Points in Time

I love "All I Can Stands" and his Logic Lifeline which taught me a new figure of speech today. AICS links to an American Spectator piece that explains it in terms of the Wilson-Plame lawsuit against Rove, Libby, and Cheney:

In TV-land the moment is infamous.

One of the stars of the longtime hit TV series Happy Days, Arthur "The Fonz" Fonzerelli, played by Henry Winkler, is made to do something by the show's writers that was clearly designed to save the fading series from sinking ratings.

The something? The Fonz, on water skis, was forced to literally jump a shark. The episode not only failed to save the once popular series that also starred future director Ron Howard, "jumping the shark" became a Hollywood metaphor for the point at which a once believable premise became a caricature.

With the filing of a lawsuit against Vice President Cheney, White House political aide Karl Rove and ex-Vice Presidential aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame have finally jumped the shark. With the revelation by columnist Robert Novak that it was neither Rove nor Libby, much less Cheney, who was his primary source for his column mentioning -- in passing no less -- that Wilson's now-famous assignment to Niger was arranged by his CIA-wife, Wilson's entire claim to fame takes a torpedo amidships. The New York Post now reports that Novak's main source was the anti-Iraq War Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a charge that Armitage has thus far not refuted.
http://www.theamericanspectator.org/dsp_article.asp?art_id=10091

I love it. However it leaves me with a burden that I will carry for awhile. I've been pacing and thinking of examples of just when certain individuals and groups went off the deep end and became a caricature.

When did Jesse Jackson jump the shark?

And the civil rights movement?

Was there one sentinel event when Howard Dean moved from the realm of politics to cartoon?

When did the ACLU jump the shark?

The American Spectator, Rush Limbaugh, FOX News, all those wonderful conservative bloggers out there (like AICS), and others in this new "age of information" shine a cold and revealing light on fashionable lunacy, defining it as such. Just a few years ago the celebrated elites could tread on the truth with impunity and spew the most outrageous bilge without being called on it. But the once sacrosanct is now fair game for inspection... And if you jump the shark (I love it) you are going to be called on it. And that, my friends, must drive the formerly protected classes to distraction.