This business about "earmarks" in the federal budgets passed by Congress has become a bit silly.

Driven in good measure by presidential politics, the Senate took up -- and quickly rejected -- a proposal to ban the process of earmarking, or inserting special spending provisions, into the budget. The vote was 71-29, so clearly a fat majority of senators from both parties see value in the system.

The three major party candidates for president, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and John McCain voted for the proposed ban. And no wonder, McCain has made doing away with earmarking a big deal in the Senate and in his presidential campaign. Neither Clinton nor Obama want to be dogged at the heels on this issue should they end up facing McCain.

Hawaii Sens. Daniel Inouye and Dan Akaka voted against the ban. Inouye, in particular, is a skillful user of the earmark process to channel money for a myriad of Hawaii projects, from brown tree snake eradication to support for the East West Center.

And that's why this fight is a bit silly. Most of the criticism of earmarking focuses on projects that are, or at least appear to be, somewhat beneath the Congressional budget process. This is where the Little League parks, museums of the obscure and "bridges to nowhere" sneak in.

But one man's silly is another's serious. Hawaii's leaders like to point out that spending millions to defend against a tiny snake may seem silly to someone from rattlesnake country, like McCain, Not so silly for someone who has seen the destruction left by these snakes on Guam.

Yes, earmarking is "political,"but then so too is the entire Congressional budget process. The plain fact is that most of the earmarked items, important as they might be, are too parochial to get heard in the regular budget. If they are wasteful or unneeded, point that out and eliminate them. But otherwise, the politics is about making a huge fuss over the process when there is so much more to talk about.