The media's useful idiot won't go away.

Last night, Lawrence O’Donnell, substituting somewhat grimly for the convulsive Keith Olbermann, closed “Countdown” by recycling—almost in its entirety—a CBS Morning  News interview with Levi Johnston as a way of replaying the deadbeat dude’s charge that Sarah called baby Trig a “retard” and his threat to unload “something huge” on  her if Palin came back at him.

O’Donnell followed this clip with a brief conversation with an Alaska talk show host that added no value to the non story.  The point of the segment, aside from the opportunity it offered to horn in on a few secords of Johnston’s 15 minutes, was to air out Palin’s family issues again.  For members of the leftwing media this is a fatal attraction.  They can’t get enough of it and of the opportunity it provides to bash—under the pious guise of chastising hypocrisy–what their postmodernist comrades in the academy deride as “heteronormativity.” 

(Although it is also true that they love the punning sexual innuendoes Bristol’s tongue-tied backwoods baby daddy–“something HUGE”;  “Levi’s salty nuts”–provides, either by a slip of the tongue or by slipping off his clothes for Playgirl.)

The nasty voyeurism,  suffocating enough in the case of Olbermann and others at MSNBC, has reached  Krafft-Ebbing proportions in the  case of faux conservative   blogger Andrew Sullivan. The Pope of America’s Gays spent the entire campaign season last year positioning Palin in the gynecological stirrups of his blog so as to examine with Groundhog Day monotony the circumstances of Trig’s delivery.  A contemptuous critic of the “birthers,” Sullivan doesn’t seem to realize that in his giddy fixation with Sarah’s private parts he has become one himself. Even today he can’t let the subject go any more than the 9/11 conspiracists can abandon their loony calculus of exactly how Bush set the charges that brought down the Twin Towers. Levi gives him the strength to keep the obsession going. That he finds Johnston so friggin hot makes the political part of the story weirdly personal for Sullivan.  Until a couple of years ago, I  always admired  his work.  I wish he knew how to quit the Palins.