There was symmetry in the news that barraged us one day last week -- Michael Jackson, not to mention Farrah Fawcett, had died, and the governor of South Carolina had made a nitwit and a creep out of himself over a woman in Argentina.

Politics, entertainment -- you can't tell where one leaves off and the other takes up.

The weirder, the better, as with the late Mr. Jackson and the politically late Mark Sanford. We eat it all up with big spoons: on TV, on the Internet, in the papers. Have you heard …? If one hasn't, one soon will. Life as Freak Show is the life we lead, due to the expertise of the mass media in satisfying our lust for the worst. It was probably ever thus, but we're just better at it now, and more comprehensive.

Politics, the science of government, didn't used to be so intimately connected to the vast industry that exists to make us laugh and drool. What would the late-night comedians joke about if political jokes fell flat? Would Jon Stewart even have a career? The Michael Jackson of Neverland fame didn't used to have his equivalents in state and national capitals. He does now. Mark Sanford is one such -- joining in that unblessed estate the likes of John Edwards, John Ensign, Eliot Spitzer and William J. Clinton.

The bigger politics bulks in our daily obsessions, the more attention we have to pay to it; the more attention we have to pay, the higher our expectations for it soar. Pretty soon an average lawyer becomes the Hope of Humanity.

Even buffoons of a highly conventional sort -- Mark Sanford would be a good example -- become would-be saviors. Theoretically, lucid "observers" of politics once touted Sanford for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012. Such talk may have done him in, as often happens with buffoons. Once they start seeing themselves as saviors, needing only another election victory, a few score millions more in the bank, larger staffs, more time on "Meet the Press" -- it's then they become dangerous.

A powerful buffoon is always someone to be watched with trepidation. He knows no limits. Ohhhh, but he's the center of interest and attention. After a while, he's the Greatest -- in his own eyes. Continued...