The other day, the NYT’s Kit Seelye described how slips of the candidates’ tongues play out in today’s world:

The speed at which [Clinton's RFK assassination] remarks were transmitted and reacted to illustrated the new reality candidates are grappling with in this year’s campaign, in which Mr. Obama’s own remarks about “bitter” small-town voters ricocheted around the Internet.

Mrs. Clinton’s remarks were initially reported online by The New York Post, whose reporters were not traveling with the Clinton campaign but were instead watching a live video feed of the meeting with newspaper editors. Its report quickly jumped to the Drudge Report, then whipped around the Internet and on television, with outraged comments piling up on Web sites.

Campaign aides were taken aback by the quick reaction to her remarks, but then quickly realized that Mrs. Clinton had to backpedal. She then spoke to the traveling press corps for the first time in more than a week, at a supermarket here.

Yesterday, Seelye followed up andn described the devastating effect that this latest sensational pseudo-event has had on Clinton’s campaign:

The Clinton campaign began a concerted effort over the weekend to try to “set the record straight” and contain the damage from Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s comments Friday about Robert F. Kennedy.

In a letter to The Daily News, published Sunday, Mrs. Clinton said her remarks had been taken entirely out of context.

Her aides also said that the news media and the campaign of Senator Barack Obama were partly responsible for fanning the flames.

Seelye gave a lot of space to the dynamic of the controversy, explaining exactly how it got started and how the flames were fanned:

Shortly after Mrs. Clinton spoke on Friday, the Obama campaign jumped on the story, sending an e-mail message to reporters saying her comment had no place in a presidential campaign. It linked to a online report in The New York Post that said Mrs. Clinton was “making an odd comparison between the dead candidate and Barack Obama” — a phrase the newspaper later dropped.

On “Face the Nation” Sunday on CBS, Mr. Wolfson said, “It was unfortunate and unnecessary, and in my opinion, inflammatory, for the Obama campaign to attack Senator Clinton on Friday for these remarks, without obviously knowing the full facts or context.”

The Obama campaign had also e-mailed to reporters a transcript of a harsh critique of Mrs. Clinton on “Countdown With Keith Olbermann” on MSNBC.

On Sunday, George Stephanopoulos, the host of “This Week” on ABC, asked David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s top strategist, about sending the transcript.

“You say you’re not trying to stir the issue up,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said. “But a member of your press staff yesterday was sending around to an entire press list — I have the e-mail here — Keith Olbermann’s searing commentary against Hillary Clinton. So that is stirring this up, isn’t it?”

Indeed it is. The gaffe wars—aka the “distractions”—are very effective. That’s why both sides have been stirring them up, with the help of an all-too-willing press (to great effect, particularly on the Obama side).

Meanwhile: it is all dirty, stinking politics. Here’s what I mean: while his campaign was stirring the tremendous enmity among Democrats, Saint Barack the Post-Partisan was advising Wesleyan graduates to take a vow of poverty in order to gain personal “salvation” through serving the common good.

This comment, and his crowd-pleasing reference to America’s “money culture” didn’t even get picked up by the usual blogospheric suspects, much less the MSM. I guess they don’t qualify as gaffes.

Or perhaps the media is playing favorites in the gaffe wars, too. Rather than cop to that, The Politico’s John Harris writes a mea culpa about the media’s “lack of proportionality” in reporting the “gaffes”

The signature defect of modern political journalism is that it has shredded the ideal of proportionality.

Important stories, sometimes the product of months of serious reporting, that in an earlier era would have captured the attention of the entire political-media community and even redirected the course of a presidential campaign, these days can disappear with barely a whisper.

Trivial stories — the kind that are tailor-made for forwarding to your brother-in-law or college roommate with a wisecracking note at the top — can dominate the campaign narrative for days.

Who can guess what stories will cause the media machine to rev up its hype jets?

Read the whole thing.

The White House calls bullshit on NBC, and the network digs in, likely to its detriment. David Bauder elaborates:

Through its unusual public criticism of NBC’s handling of Richard Engel’s interview with the president, the Bush administration struck at the soft white underbelly of the news division’s co-existence with the opinionated personalities of MSNBC.

“I’m sure you don’t want people to conclude that there is really no distinction between the `news’ as reported on NBC and the `opinion’ as reported on MSNBC, despite the increasing blurring of those lines,” Bush counselor Ed Gillespie wrote to NBC News President Steve Capus in a letter pointedly released to the public.

Tom Rosenstiel is quoted making an obvious point:

“Getting into the game of trying to attract an audience based on your point of view rather than reporting is dangerous because it does invite this kind of backlash,”

Pshaw, says NBC’s Steve Capus:

“Viewers are savvy enough to know the differences in that kind of programming,” Capus said. “The mission of NBC News hasn’t changed. The difference is that MSNBC has had some success, and success comes with attention and scrutiny.

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard this laissez-fair attitude from NBC. Nor is this the first time I’ve written about this issue.

A year ago, I wrote [note that I have since then updated some inactive links]:

[Why would an organization like NBC News, which just two weeks ago had to [send representatives] on Oprah to explain why they aired as “news” the Cho sick fantasy tapes, be so sanguine about Olbermann switching between opinion (like his denouncement of Giuliani in a Countdown “Special Commentary”) and “journalism” (like his hosting the Republican debate, which featured Giuliani among others)?

Because infotainment rules (obviously!)—that’s why—and it’s up to us viewers to figure out what we should take seriously or not:

Olbermann knows to leave his opinions at home when he anchors events, said Phil Griffin, NBC News senior vice president.

“Keith’s an adult,” Griffin said. “He can tell when it’s appropriate to express himself in a commentary and when to be a journalist. That’s one of his strengths. He knows exactly the tone and his role when he’s doing anything.”

Of course political campaigns are also a circus, and politicians are the world’s most shameless showmen and -women … so, for all I care, Olbermann can throw tomatoes at all of them the next time he hosts a “debate”—that would be really fun!

But he’s still a despicable hack. And NBC News is inviting a further loss of its credibility by referring to Olbermann’s program Countdown as “news” and by referring to anything he does as “journalism.” At least CNN tries to distinguish between “news” and “views” and Glenn Beck refers to himself as a “rodeo clown.”

Since I wrote that post, Olbermann was of course elevated to serious anchor status, with a prominent seat and voice on primary Tuesdays.

Ann Althouse was intrigued by this post from Emily Bazelton about why women stray (which Bazelton wrote in response to a piece by Philip Weiss in New York magazine).

Althouse quotes Bazelton [e.a.]:

Like everything else about male sexuality, the male desire to lie with another woman is boringly uncomplicated. But why do women have affairs? The judgment of literature (Anna Karenina, Madam Bovary) is that they feel trapped and oppressed, or, less sympathetically, that they’re easily gulled by preying males one or two notches up the social ladder. Two centuries later, I would imagine that life is a bit different. The answer we heard from writers like Erica Jong and Gael Greene back in the swingin’ Plato’s Retreat 1970s was that women crave sexual variety in precisely the same way men do. Three decades later, though, feminism no longer insists that women’s desires and inclinations be identical to those of men. It may even be permitted to recognize that, at least superficially, the female sex drive seems, in the aggregate, less pronounced (or at least less conspicuous) than the male sex drive. You don’t hear stories about men telling their wives they no longer want to have sex. You do hear stories about women telling their husbands they no longer want to have sex.

Just because you don’t hear stories about such men doesn’t mean they don’t exist!
This “debate” is all just so much intellectual masturbation, not to mention an utter bore.