Glenn Greenwald captures precisely my own feelings on the Anthony Wiener episode and what it tells us about the state of politics and the media in the US.

There are few things more sickening — or revealing — to behold than a D.C. sex scandal. Huge numbers of people prance around flamboyantly condemning behavior in which they themselves routinely engage. Media stars contrive all sorts of high-minded justifications for luxuriating in every last dirty detail, when nothing is more obvious than that their only real interest is vicarious titillation. Reporters who would never dare challenge powerful political figures who torture, illegally eavesdrop, wage illegal wars or feed at the trough of sleazy legalized bribery suddenly walk upright — like proud peacocks with their feathers extended — pretending to be hard-core adversarial journalists as they collectively kick a sexually humiliated figure stripped of all importance. The ritual is as nauseating as it is predictable.

I am as titillated as the next person by salacious gossip about people I know either personally or as public figures. I won’t pretend that I turn away in high-minded purity from such stories. But I wonder about the health of a society in which the private lives of people escape from the gossip columns of the tabloids (which is where they belong, if at all) and become a major obsession. It seems to indicate a society that seeks distractions because it does not have the stomach to confront the far more serious issues it faces.

As Greenwald says:

Can one even imagine how much different — and better — our political culture would be if our establishment media devoted even a fraction of the critical scrutiny and adversarial energy it devoted to the Weiner matter to things that actually matter? But that won’t happen, because the people who comprise that press corps, with rare exception, are both incapable of focusing on things that matter and uninterested in doing so. Talking about shirtless pictures and expressing outrage about private sexual behavior — like some angry, chattering soap opera fan furious that one of their best-known characters cheated — is about the limit of their abilities and their function.

Greenwald’s whole post is, as usual, well worth reading.