And, if you can, to take great pleasure in it. There are so many people out there . . . Liveline listeners, Muslims, Christian fundamentalists, the staff and readers of the Daily Mail, half of the US . . . waiting to be offended or looking for some excuse to be outraged, or finding a high horse on which to climb, or achieving a blissful state of high dudgeon, that you're duty bound, if you have half a functioning brain at all, to try and upset them.

For all the mistakes that he has made in the last week, therefore, not least of which was running a satirical piece about Tiger Woods's wife which wasn't remotely humorous, Trevor White, the publisher of Dublinermagazine, deserves our support.

This is a more popular view, I would suspect, than you might have gauged thus far from the reaction to the Dubliner piece, in which the magazine appears to have superimposed Mrs Tiger's head on a topless body and suggested that she was a porn star. Like I said, not remotely funny but, like all satire, done with a particular objective in mind. In this case, according to a statement from the magazine, "the publishers believed that readers would not be left thinking that there was any truth in the assertions, it being an absurd parody of inaccurate tabloid publishing generally."

Mrs Tiger isn't the only GWAG satirised. Chad Campbell's wife Amy is described as "a large chested singer who entered American Idol, but didn't get anywhere";

Jim Furyk's wife Tabitha (cool name, Tabby) is said to be "famous for wearing white halter tops in the rain, " while the unfortunate Sonya Toms . . . wife of David Toms . . . is pictured in a bikini in which, Dubliner says, she finds it "liberating" to walk around the house.

"Isn't there a law against people like that?"

I suspect that it might have been that last sentence which did for Dubliner. The strident tone, the solemn, disapproving feel of the words, at once both question and declaration, is very American. The righteousness of the sentence, and the moral certainty that it satirises, would have been very familiar to readers from the United States, where irony, like golf, is a minority sport. When the American team members and their spouses received their free copies of the magazine (Dubliner's second big mistake of the week), the offending piece probably jumped out at them as the genuine article, so often had they read similar fire and brimstone stuff in the US media. Either that or they are remarkably stupid.

In any case, there wasn't a peep out of Tabitha and Sonya and Amy or, for that matter, Mrs Tiger. It was left to her husband to make his displeasure known at a scheduled press conference on Wednesday. The ire of the Tiger is a tremendous thing.

Before he spoke, hardly anybody was aware of Dublinermagazine, still less of its piece on the GWAGS. After his contribution, Trevor White was a household name all over the world and Dubliner had become a byword for all that's evil in the media.

White is an interesting enough chap. He has made a name for himself as a scourge of poor standards in Irish restaurants, although that seems to be based mainly on a handful of bad reviews over the years. He is unfailingly polite. Although I've never met him, he did play in a soccer match against a Sunday Tribune team once and achieved instant fame for tackling one of our players and then . . . "I do beg your pardon" . . . apologising.

In a recent interview in this newspaper, he laid out his theory of journalism and of how it fitted into the relative success of his magazine in recent years. "I don't want to put pictures of scantily clad actresses on the cover, " he said. "I don't wish to pander to that aspect of the culture.

I genuinely believe . . . and this is my core conviction with the magazine . . .

there is an audience for intelligent, curious journalism."

Unfortunately for Mr White, there is a far bigger audience for the kind of public flogging meted out to him last week, and no shortage of complete floggers to get stuck in. Naturally enough, Liveline, that wellknown conduit of Irish idiocy, was in the middle of it all, stirring the pot and providing a platform for the easily offended. The main thrust of their particular beef, as I understood it, was that such filth was deeply insulting to our esteemed visitors. Had any of the whingers argued the merits of the Dubliner article as a piece of satire, you could have engaged with them and agreed with them that it was a bit of a flop. Instead, it was being put forward as an example of the degeneration of Ireland, the final proof that we are all being carried to hell in a media-driven handbasket.

The Dubliner piece may not have succeeded as satire (to say the least of it); it may not even have worked as "an absurd parody of inaccurate tabloid publishing generally", but on so many other levels, it was a roaring success. By highlighting the fact that the easily offended are so numerous, and by hurting them so grievously, by exposing the retarded nature of much of the US media, which got into an unbelievable lather over this story, and by revealing that so many Irish people are still in thrall to the Americans . . . they who must not be offended . . . the Dubliner provided a huge public service.

One hopes that Trevor White survives it all. "I'm sensitive like everyone else, but probably a little less sensitive than I was about five years ago, " he said in his Sunday Tribune interview. "You get over it. Or else you just turn into this rather pompous little person who takes it all too seriously." Which brings us very nicely back to Tiger Woods, don't you think?