Unsupportable Premise

After we ate a memorably horrible breakfast at Bob's Big Boy in maybe 1998, my brother commented that it was a good idea to eat there every so often, just to remind yourself how awful the food is. Sage advice. I follow a similar dictum with super-famous columnists whose writing I don't find particularly illuminating, Maureen Dowd* among them. Today's column opened with the following premise:

Sadly, there’s no such thing as a private affair anymore.

Well, sure that's true if you focus exclusively on the affairs that are public. Of course, by nature of being secret, the surely existent affairs that would refute Dowd's thesis are hidden from all except the principals. During every political scandal you hear people who ask, "How could he be so stupid to do something like that in this day and age, everyone gets caught." But they don't, we just don't know who the people are who get away with it, because their affairs remain private. I mean, the reason Spitzer was so casual was probably because he had been doing stuff like that for years without a whiff of scandal.

*I'd like to add that I don't find Dowd awful in a Bob's Big Boy sort of way, but, as with the breakfast bar at Bob's, I suffer from regular consumption of 800-word doses of Dowd.