The Paris Hilton Saga, Chapter 37

I can sum up the totality of America's social problems with one sentence: Paris Hilton's DUI arrest constituted national news. I'm not talking about 24 hour cable news blather either, but real, hardcore, Katie Couric third day on the job, in your face evening news. Should I be surprised? Probably not, but I am. When this story "broke" early in the morning, of course it was going to make the cable wire. They've got 24 hours of news to fill; it doesn't take much to get on Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN; this much I know is true. The story seemed to snowball throughout the day though, and part of me started to think that it had a shot at cracking network coverage. At first, I figured there was no chance that the big, semi-legitimate news anchors would waste precious minutes of their scant half hour on Paris Hilton coverage (unless she died) but I was dead wrong. There it was: Paris Hilton's DUI, it was like the third story. Unbelievable. The funniest thing is that it wasn't that big of a deal. She didn't crash her car into a pregnant mother's womb or run over a kid on a tricycle. She blew a 0.08, which is nothing. Her 98-pound frame just needs to be in the vicinity of booze and her blood alcohol will crack the legal limit.

Confounding the whole damn thing was her weird lawyer who offered up one of those, "Yes, she was wrong, but everything's been blown out of proportion" spiels (which just happened to be true), but all the while displaying a smile that said, "You idiots, Paris Hilton is so rich, like she gives a crap about any of this." I was simultaneously angered and amused by this clip, which of course was picked up by every cable station and run four times an hour, every hour, all day long.