CBS DC is inexplicably shocked that Attorney General Eric Holder bored a good portion of the 700 kids who saw him speak at the Boys and Girls Club in Washington Tuesday, lulling the kids to sleep. The CBS headline, Holder’s Speech Puts Kids To Sleep At Boys And Girls Club Event, could just as easily have been "Ungrateful Children Rudely Waste Opportunity to Learn Invaluable Lesson from Washington Leader's Speech."

Somehow this is news, but what's interesting to us is what CBS's shock says about Washington. Like Politico's marveling a couple weeks ago that some people have sex with other people within city limits, or reporters miscalculation of what counts as cool, this story offers further evidence that Washington is a very special (terrible) place. It is a place populated by people whose teenage selves were less like the kids on 90210, or My So Called Life, or even Clarissa Explains It All, but instead more like Tracy Flick, the Reese Witherspoon's ambitious, ruthless, headband-wearing, culturally clueless nerd in Election who eventually gets a working for a congressman. 

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Elspeth Reeve