Schmuck Private

Sully Joe opens his essay "The End of Privacy" with these deep thoughts:

It's almost a given in our current culture that privacy doesn't exist any more. No email is safe from being forwarded; websites proclaiming the most intimate of information can be set up and taken down overnight; what was once whispered in coffee klatsches and around water coolers is now on the Web, 24 hours a day.

Oh, to return to those halcyon days of respect for seclusion, when paper correspondence burst into flames if anyone tried to pass it on; when persons never repeated what they were told in confidence; when people stood around the water cooler and gossiped for eight hours, tops. You know, the days when the police could arrest adults for engaging in intercourse in their own beds. Those days.

Of course, the story which is the subject of Sully's article appeared in newsprint as well as on the web, so Sully's condemnation of the web isn't really on point. And does anyone believe the Washington Post Media Group will take the WaPo website down overnight?

This is the same Sully whose obsession with President Clinton's extramarital activities is legendary, who champions his pal Drudge, the originator of the bogus Kerry affair story, and who blogged on the bogus Kerry rumor himself. And his concern for marital privacy wasn't much in evidence when he was blabbing about Posh and Becks last week.

The "End of Irony" is more like it.