Dirty Laundry

You have to either be insane or a masochist to want the job of President of the United States.

It turns out that Sarah Palin's teenage daughter is pregnant out of wedlock. And her husband was convicted of DWI. In 1984. And Barack Obama did inhale, and John McCain, war hero, has a nasty temper he can't control and five or six houses, he can't remember which, in various parts of the country.

Screw ups, one and all. So let's villify them, mock them, and divert attention away from, you know, relevant issues, by digging up the dirt. I'll bet that within the next few days we'll also find out that Sarah Palin inhaled too, back in her college days, and that Joe Biden once attended a college fraternity kegger and passed out on the couch.

It's just good investigative journalism, right? Because we, the American people, have a right to know. Never mind that, even though we won't admit it, we're also Pharisaical prudes.

I have a crazy idea: let's apply the same standards to journalists that they apply to politicians. For every breathless story written about a politician's foibles, some other journalist gets to write a breathless story, after doing a solid background check and thorough vetting, of that journalist's past. I know. It will never happen because nobody really cares about what a journalist might have done a quarter century ago. Exactly.