And the Speculating Leads to Touching, and the Touching Leads to Wanking, and then There is No Intellect Left

Shorter Patrick Healy: Your sex life is highly relevant to discussions about political figures. If you’re a Democrat.

And, of course, in his (admittedly selective) obsession Healy follows the priorities of our beloved Dean of Punditry:

So to sum up Broder’s worldview:

Bill Clinton’s Wang And What It’s Doing Right This Second: HOT! HOT! HOT!

Lies That Have Killed Tens Of Thousands: EH. THIS MAKES ME SLEEPY.

In addition, Will Bunch makes a good point about this idiotic story presumably being a front-page advertisement for the Times’ new blog. However, I disagree that this was the case of the NYT trying to pander to the vulgar blogosphere; after all, they have been signing Maureen Dowd’s paychecks for many years before they decided to start a blog–evidently, they’re independently interested in dumb vulgarity masquerading as political coverage. (In fairness, maybe Dowd’s obsession with meaningless and sometimes made-up-out-of-whole-cloth trivia is the result of her being dumped by Michael Douglas and Aaron Sorkin. Perhaps the NYT can interview 50 people about it and splash the results over the front page.)

Admittedly, I’m particularly cranky about the more onanistic parts of the media today because I forgot to turn the radio back to NPR after listening to the Mets game while resting last night, and hence woke up to Imus and Mike Barnacle whining about how mean people were being to poor Tim Russert and his great new “book.” Hasn’t my stomach suffered enough recently?