Politico is breathlessly revealing the facts about President Trump's adviser, Stephen Miller, for the benefit of its high-I.Q. readers.  The site went and published an account by a still embittered former third-grader, who had to sit next to fellow third-grader Miller and wants to tell all the dirt about it.

Here is how it starts:

Each time a new outrage emerges in the saga of Stephen Miller – author of the Muslim ban and chief architect of the child separation policy – I think of the year I spent with him.  This was long before Miller, a senior adviser to the president, had earned a reputation as perhaps the cruelest and most ruthless member of the Trump administration.

It was the year he sat next to me in third grade.

Ready to gag?

It only gets worse from there:

He especially was obsessed with tape and glue.  Along the midpoint of our desk, Stephen laid down a piece of white masking tape, explaining that it marked the boundary of our sides and that I was not to cross it.  The formality of this struck me as odd.  I was a fairly neat kid, at least at school, and I had never spread my things to his side of the desk.  Stephen, meanwhile, could not have been much messier: His side of the desk was sticky and peeling, littered with scraps of paper, misshapen erasers and pencil nubs.

If this adhesive division kept Stephen on his side of the desk, I was all for it, as unfriendly as it seemed.  But instead, the tape became an attractive nuisance.  Stephen picked at it with his fingernails, methodically, in a mixture of absentmindedness and what seemed like channeled hostility.  This process of effacement left a thin layer of sticky grime, not altogether dissimilar from the rest of Stephen's desk.

Stephen rubbed his fingers over this layer of grime, rolling it into little gray pellets until it, too, was gone.  Then he applied a new piece of tape, along with a renewed warning that I was not to cross it.  Don't rinse, but do repeat – for months.

Had enough?  Who knows whether this clown (who, truly, never got over it and will forever remain a third-grader because of it) is actually fibbing?  Is there some way for journalists to check?  Don't think so, and in any case, can't see Politico doing it.

Breitbart has some appropriate derision for what passes for journalism these days at Politico.

Incredibly, this was deemed newsworthy by this news outlet, whose crazed leftist audience apparently laps this stuff up.  As if anyone could draw any conclusions about Miller from this boob's account.  As if this schoolkid bitterness actually enlightens anyone.  What it reminds me of is the breathless reporting that went around during the 2012 election, when the press reported, over and over, that GOP candidate Mitt Romney messed up some kid's hair when Romney himself was a kid.

Message?  If you go into politics as a Republican, every last thing you ever did as a kid will be printed as a breathless outrage, the better to embarrass you and whip up leftist fury against you.  Nothing, not even your tender childhood, is off limits.  If you were ever a child, that childhood will be breached and exposed as a scandal.

I don't see any similar reporting on Ben Rhodes, and you know that if that guy got denied a preliminary security clearance, alone among hundreds of people, there must have been something interesting.  Nope, no comparable reporting on that one.  For that matter, there never was much from the press on Obama's Choom Gang adventuring, either.  But now that there are Republicans to oppose, and those Republicans are winning, the left is getting desperate.  This practice of microscopically reporting on Republican childhoods seems to be a new one.  In a way, it reminds me of how the Bolsheviks used to report every minute tale of Lenin's and Stalin's childhood as little tales of heroism for the kids – except that the perspective is flipped, and now every bad thing is reported as "news."

Proud of yourselves, Politico?

Image credit: Gage Skidmore via Flickr, CC SA-BY 2.0.