the rix mix

WASHINGTON (AP) -- When Robert Steinbuch discovered his girlfriend had discussed intimate details about their sex life in her online diary, the Capitol Hill staffer didn't just get mad. He got a lawyer.

Soon, though, the racy tidbits about the sex lives of the two Senate aides faded from the front pages and the gossip pages. Steinbuch accepted a teaching job in Arkansas, leaving Washington and Jessica Cutler's "Washingtonienne" Web log behind.

While sex scandals turn over quickly in this city, lawsuits do not. Steinbuch's case over the embarrassing, sexually charged blog appears headed for an embarrassing, sexually charged trial.

Lurid testimony about spanking, handcuffs and prostitution aside, the Washingtonienne case could help establish whether people who keep online diaries are obligated to protect the privacy of the people they interact with offline.

This lawsuit is still a big deal among the "Sex & the City" era Repug political junkies who read the old Wonkette faithfully & are perversely interested in how other young, beautiful & privileged American fascisti have sex. Admittedly, I was once mildly surprised to learn that some of these "conservatives" - who sterilize their underwear in microwaves & snort expensive fragrances to mask the odor of the unwashed masses - enjoy doggy style & don't consider oral sex disgustingly unhygienic. They are, after all, the same ambitious youngsters who advocated the impeachment of Bill Clinton for revealing nuclear attack codes to bimbos & demanded the Smithsonian display the Stained Apparel of Monica. For years they smirked privately at Mark Foley, & gladly worked for bigots who want homosexuals castrated or clitorally circumcised. They lined up to lick the arsehole of any rightwing Bible bleater with a full collection plate & the influence to help their careers. Photos from Abu Ghraib gave them months of masturbatory pleasure, but now videos of beheadings & bloody Baghdad carnage hardly get their juices flowing.

Decades on a radio station that permitted me all the freedoms not prohibited by the F.C.C., & long associations with alternative publications that printed just about any confessional-style poem I submitted, made me circumspect about the kind of personal information I revealed. Unnecessarily, perhaps. There are certain laws regarding "libelous" portrayals of living persons not famous. What I know about others they may also know about me. But what they know is merely embarrassing rather than interesting.

So what to make of someone who published the details of her jaded interactions with under-the-beltway penises on the internet & now defends herself not on the grounds of free speech (we'd hardly expect that in the era of heightened National Security), but by claiming a blog is a personal diary like something she left out on her coffee table for her friends to browse. Steinbuch is a jerk. Cutler is an exhibitionist. In a different life she'd be in porn films. Instead, she capitolized by posing for Playboy & writing an urbane "novel" 100 pages too long for the genre that one could display two summers ago next to one's cocktail & high end cell phone on any of the East Coast's exclusive beaches. Go at it, kids. But your 15 minutes worth of fame has already lasted half-an-hour, your 120 Days of Sodom for nearly six years & counting.