No values. No judgment. A courtier class of bootlicking stooges to power. Fuck'em.

...and just think if Bill and Monica had anal sex? Death penalty?

To this day, I still have those around me who are infuriated that Clinton "had sex with that woman," and should have been impeached for lying. Yet they say nothing of the egregious behvior of the Bush Administration. Pathetic...

You are absolutely right. As long as the right (and too much of the left) continue to believe that Clinton's "sins" are serious transgressions against us all, rather than personal bad judgement, the chickens will not come home to roost for Bush and Cheney.

It's time this country was able to separate personal or extreme religious views from the measure of national relevance. A perceived crime against their own moral "values" is not the same as a crime against the laws of the United States.

In Arkansas, they have passed a ban on unmarried people fostering or adopting children. The children don't matter. The enforcement of one group's misplaced moral outrage does, apparently.

That's the barometer of choice for way too many Americans. People like Dowd should not be reinforcing it.

Vapid reporters are more interested in, and capable of understanding, titillating sex scandals than they are dreary, boring matters like lawbreaking, torture, surveillance, and pretexts for wars.

Is the reason for this false equivalence just this, or is it also about running away from the ever-persistent idea that journalists are in the tank for the Democrats? God forbid they state that a Republican did more harm than a Democrat.

That was the only drag of an actually pretty good column.

I have said for a long while that the 2008 election will really be about the mass media and their piss-poor conventional wisdom. As editors, managers and owners of media outlets look back at their coverage over this cycle, let us hope they see how pathetic and empty-headed it was. Everyone should read the biggest misses column by Glenn's colleague. Such idiocy needs to be expunged from the news.

Maybe Obama will both shred the Constitution and hold orgies in the Lincoln bedroom; that way, everyone will be happy.

Two people committing a sex act in which a number of sperm died, followed by a ludicrous lie about it and that equates with the death and misery, combined with the continued attacks on our civil rights the Bush administration have caused?

Ms. Dowd has some stones -

Nobody wants to see someone else having a good time where sex is concerned.

Such is the result of our puritanical roots.

So Clinton's sexual escapades raises more blood pressure than the illegal invasion of Iraq, the torure of prisoners, Katrina, etc.

We're all poor judges of character, it seems.

If I thought nimrod pundits like Dowd were just half-handedly tossing in an anti-Clinton tear when listing the real crimes of the Bush Jr. regime just to shut up their editors or keep the right wing flying nut squads from freaking out, well, it would still be wrong, but I would at least understand it.

The problem is that I believe they found the Bill Clinton / Monica Lewinsky 'scandal' to be as personally painful and horrifying as the actual, major, significant, nation- and world-changing abuses of the Bush Jr. regime.

I know a lot of ordinary people who do that too. I regard it as near clinical insanity, but then these people live in awfully strange mental and moral worlds.

I don't know how you get the strength to read MoDo anymore, GG. I gave up a long time ago. Her idiocy aside, her writing is just terrible. So desperate to be flip and hip.

Clinton put a hottub on the White House lawn?! Why wasn't he impeached for that national disgrace?!!

This column needs to be read outside of Glenn's normal readership. Please push the share button at the bottom of the column, select digg, and digg it. Lots of diggs gets the column exposure throughout the media.

These media practices can only exist if enough people ignore them.

Shine light on bad logic! Read Greenwald!

aka kazak2

"These things are not equal. They're not even comparable."

Very true, but I don't see where she equates or compares them. It reads like a laundry list to me, and it seems that lying to American public should be on that list.

George Bush let donors sleep in the White House, too.

Vapid reporters are more interested in, and capable of understanding, titillating sex scandals than they are dreary, boring matters like lawbreaking, torture, surveillance, and pretexts for wars.

There must be some truly idiotic reporters out there for whom this sentiment is basically true, but Glenn you're often quick to censure your commenters when we express these types of assumptions. In this case, I sincerely doubt that many reporters are incapable of understanding the issues -- they just have people above them telling them what they can and can't pursue. You know the top MSM executives have been taking lots of notes on the spectacular successes of Fox, Limbaugh, Hannity, Drudge, etc. They also learned early on that the Bush Administration was going to punish non-compliant reporters by cutting off access. And they were also very leery about coming across as unpatriotic as Bush led us to war -- then once we were in the quagmire they were obviously leery about being exposed as the propagandists they had turned into.

Anyway, I just think the primary culprits responsible for our pathetic media system must reside at the top of the food chain, not with the reporter holding the mic or pen.

Very true, but I don't see where she equates or compares them. It reads like a laundry list to me, and it seems that lying to American public should be on that list.

Tapinyips and Charles Manson are both bad people, the former because he sometimes reasons poorly and the latter because he's a mass murderer.

I know, because I'm related to quite a few.

Never have figured out why they think this way, beyond a vague theory that they're using different parts of their brains when deciding one kind of official and destructive Presidential behavior is OK (or actually COMMENDABLE), while purely personal misbehavior is worthy of the death penalty.

The worst part of it? One particular close family member I'm speaking of is actually a "let's sit naked in the hot tub -- me, my wife, my son and HIS WIFE TOO" kind of person. There's a huge disconnect somewhere in the synapses of their brains.

Maybe it's a previously undiagnosed kind of Attention Deficit Disorder. Whoever figures it out and develops a treatment ought to win the Nobel Prize for Medicine.