Palin, Weiner: More Than We Want to Know

Life is too short to read Sarah Palin’s 24,000 e-mails or even all the media blather about them, and sanity too precious to delve into Anthony Weiner’s last refuge from getting out of Congress and our faces

Weiner, says his spokesperson, “departed this morning to seek professional treatment to focus on becoming a better husband and healthier person.” Good idea, says Nancy Pelosi, urging him “to seek that help without the pressures of being a Member of Congress.”

A sane response to all this would be, “Who cares?” The 21st century answer for sex-plagued politicians is to medicalize their misbehavior and hide out in a psychiatric facility until the media get bored, but healers may have trouble finding the right diagnosis for flirty Tweeting with Las Vegas blackjack dealers and 17-year-old girls. The DSM of the American Psychiatric Association does not list among its mental disorders acting like a putz.

While Weiner vanishes, Palin, on the other hand, is too much with us as Alaska unloads a truckful of her e-mails, with the tantalizing footnote that 8000 are being withheld. From wading through all that, aside from headaches, any conclusion is possible.

“Palin’s E-Mails,” headlines the New York Times, “Undercut Simplistic Views of Her, Both Positive and Negative,” even as a supportive website claims, “This surreal ‘colonoscopy’ by the cartoonish mainstream media is backfiring.”

Wake me when it’s over but, in any case, before the nation slides into bankruptcy as we drown in trivia.

Update: As antidote to all this mind sewage, there is the gift of seeing Gabrielle Giffords smiling on the long, hard road to her recovery--a sign of hope for American beset by culprits and clowns.