THAT JOKE ISN'T FUNNY ANYMORE. The front page of Sunday's New York Post was devoted to this story:

I DUMPED HILL FOR OBAMA '08
City Hotel Man Opens the Door to Dem Upset

April 8, 2007 -- Bryant Park Hotel doorman Gregory Smith campaigned door to door for Bill Clinton in 1992, he voted for Hillary Rodham Clinton in both her Senate elections - but last week he went online and gave $25 to Barack Obama for president.
He says he has dumped the Clintons for the upstart Democratic senator from Illinois, whom he calls "a needed breath of fresh ideas and openness."

The doorman told The Post that Hillary Clinton's flip-flop on the war and her earlier coyness about her presidential ambitions have turned him off her - probably forever...

You can read the whole thing, but it all boils down to this: a doorman changed his choice of Presidential candidate. I know about Breslin and the gravedigger, but come on. The election is many months away. The conventions are many months away.

It has long been the conventional wisdom that we "gotta love the New York Post" for its ludicrous front-pagers -- "Headless Body in Topless Bar" and all that. I respect the tabloid writing style, and the Post editors who come up with fresh, snappy heds on a daily basis. But for me the Post's cuteness has long since worn off.

The turning point may have been this front page, in which the French and German Ambassadors to the U.N. were shown as weasels, to demonstrate the paper's contempt for those Ambassadors' lack of susceptibility to Colin Powell's U.N. slide show, which was alleged to prove that Iraq was hiding WMDs in smudgy boxes identified as mobile bioweapons labs. I suppose it might have been mildly amusing if you really believed that Colin Powell was telling the truth, and hated the French and the Germans enough to find Der Sturmer caricatures of them clever. But you have to admit that the joke hasn't aged well.

Chacun à son goût and all that, but to me this sort of thing falls into the same category as Don Imus' gag about the Rutgers Women's Basketball Team. I strongly disapprove of his suspension -- let a hundred stink-weeds bloom, so that we may not be spared knowledge of what we have become. And, in the name of the Republic, leave those who find this sort of thing funny free to laugh their fool heads off over it. It's just not my thing.

UPDATE. My editor has corrected me as to the specific object of Imus' slurs in this instance.