Circle Jerk
Yglesias notices that the tittering panel on Meat The Press got all breathless and aroused talking about the Clinton book this morning.
"Oh goodie! A chance to talk about sex!" And it really was sex. Maybe someone, somewhere out there was really concerned with the penny-ante legal charges against Clinton, but these people -- quite obviously -- were interested in sex. So fun! So easy to speculate about Clinton's dick! So much more fun than looking into the intricacies of Bush's foreign policy deceptions or budget trickery. Look -- sex scandal!
This is how they got to be known as mediawhores. Day after day we watched this drooling, sophomoric obsession with Clinton's zipper and the hunk of manhood contained therein which they couldn't stop yammering about long enough to consider that they were making utter idiots of themselves on national television and fools of the entire country around the world. Not to mention their functioning as amenable tools for a right wing character assassination squad whose dark sexual proclivities we don't even want to think about.
One of the most popular cultural phenomena during the era was Beavis and Butthead. If anyone ever wanted to see what they might have become when they grew up, all they had to do was watch a couple of the middle aged men and women of the Washington press corps go on and on in great detail about Clinton's sexual issues, the psychology behind it and whether or not the country could survive such a serious assault on its morals. It was the journalistic equivalent of Beavis and Butthead's " heheh..heheh...heheh...she said 'hard'...heheh"
As Matt noticed, it was (and is) all about the sex. There is a psychology at work in the national press corps --- and in the congress at the time --- that is worth someone taking a long look at. The level of sexual immaturity the media consistently displayed in the way they talked about it speaks to some bizarre case of mass arrested development. It's just not normal for grown people to be so obsessive about public sex talk, particularly when the talk itself is so embarrassingly puerile.
It was a low point of low points for the media, at least until they deified Junior Bush in their own bizarre adherence to what they consider fair play. ("We were very hard on the last president, so we have to go really easy on this one. Wouldn't want anyone to think we're not fair and balanced.") Today's tribute to the "The Starr Report: Deep Throat Two" is par for the course.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of it all is the picture of Russert, Novak, Klein and Kay sitting around a waist high table, flushed, dewy and breathless, restlessly moving about on their chairs as they opine about how immoral and depraved Bill Clinton was for accepting the fellating gifts of a young woman. I don't want to speculate about what might be happening under that table. But, I would suggest that such a squalid public display of early adolescent sexuality might just be more inappropriate than the acts they so sternly decry.
And, lest we forget, the public was not impressed with their little game of spin the blowjob, either. Clinton left office with the highest job approval rating in history. The press, on the other hand, has never been held in lower esteem.