The next time you read or hear a member of the mainstream media complaining about how much of the blogosphere engages in lurid sensationalism and is not to be taken seriously, then just point them today's New York Times column, Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers, written by house "conservative" David Brooks.

Yes, today is election day in several parts of the country but Brooks shuns any analysis of these races in favor of delving into the lurid world of cellphone sex from the pages of the Times opinion section which, with his column, reads more like something lifted from a sleazy sex periodical found at dented curbside machines or from web sex sites:

Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex.

...the diarists “use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead.”

Hey David!  Can you cite any cases of the cellphone callers hooking up to get their inner thighs rubbed by an anonymous senator or having a hot bromance kindled while staring admiringly at a  perfectly creased pant leg?

Brooks presents kinky cell sex as if the participants were like security traders engaging in business on the floor of the stock exchange:

Often the diarists will be on the verge of spending the evening with one partner, when a text arrives from another with a potentially better offer.

...The atmosphere is fluid, like an eBay auction. This leads to a series of marketing strategies. You don’t want to appear too enthusiastic. You want to invent detached nicknames for partners. “Make plans to spend day with the One Who Cries,” a paralegal, 26, from the East Village writes. You want to appear bulletproof as you move confidently through the transactions. “I have a Stage Five Clinger on my hands,” a TV producer writes. “He asks me to hang out again this coming Sunday. I do not respond.”

One has to pinch himself as a reminder that this luridness is actually coming from the pages of the New York Times opinion section. 

Perhaps someday Brooks will return the the mundane world of politics. If so, your humble correspondent would find the explanation for his government spending wall chart, presented to him as an Omaba gift earlier this year, a much more interesting topic than cell sex:

The White House has produced a chart showing nondefense discretionary spending as a share of G.D.P. That’s spending for education, welfare and all the stuff that Democrats love. Since 1985, this spending has hovered around 3.7 percent of G.D.P. This year, it’s about 4.6 percent. The White House claims that it is going to reduce this spending to 3.1 percent by 2019, lower than at any time in any recent Republican administration. I was invited to hang this chart on my wall and judge them by how well they meet these targets. (I have.)

So how is that wall chart working out for you, David? Perhaps the uncomfortable answer to that question is why you feel it necessary to avoid such inconvenient topics as Obama economic failures in favor of sex chatting.

—P.J. Gladnick is a freelance writer and creator of the DUmmie FUnnies blog.