I was thinking about what a historian would make of this, from The Economist’s blog:

AS EVERYONE knows by now, Larry Craig, a senator from Idaho, was arrested in June for tapping his foot suggestively in an airport restroom

I laughed till I cried.

Then I read Slate, whose editors are all over the map about this story. In the end, though, this pretty much sums it up for me: also from The Economist:

Many people still believe that putting gay marriage on state ballots helped George Bush eke out a win in key states in 2004. Whether this is true is arguable. Whether Republicans sought to do this is not. The Republican Party sought to cash in on homophobia, pure and simple. And Mr Craig signed onto that project. Many feel sorry for the man. I feel sorry for his wife and his children, but he himself is suffering a Hell of his own making. Dante could not have written it better.

Unrelated but also suffering from a hell of his own making:

The Daily Mirror reports (I know: it’s the Mirror. The important part of the story is true enough, though):

Actor Owen Wilson’s suicide bid followed a three-day drugs binge on crystal meth and deadly pills dubbed hillbilly heroin, it was revealed last night.

And the troubled star, who overdosed and cut his wrists, had a history of slashing himself, it also emerged.

The news came as police phone records confirmed they rushed to his home after a frantic call about an “attempted suicide”.

Owen, 38, is believed to have rounded off his narcotics bender by downing a bottle of powerful Oxycodone painkillers.

Sadly, there’s nothing new about actors flaming out. Also, despite Mickey Kaus’s totally valid point from a journalism and business point of view, there’s nothing new about the L.A.Times trying to bury this kind of story, which makes lots of people look very bad indeed.

Which leads me exactly to my point. What has happened to Hollywood? A few years back, there would have been a phalanx of publicists on hand keep the pack of beasts at bay. Instead—instantaneously, and on thousands upon thousands of globally linked news and gossip sites—all the sad, pitiful, deeply private details of Owen Wilson’s private hell are available for the rest of us to relish.

In the Era of No Secrets ^TM, it appears that Hollywood has given up. It isn’t even making an attempt to sell us fantasies anymore.