This silly and inconsequential look back at fancy-free youth has gone viral for some reason. While the media reminds us questions about the colossal failure in Benghazi on Hillary Clinton’s watch are old news, The Hill and other outlets seem fascinated with the track record of Ted Cruz when it comes to …. WORLD DOMINATION. And butt sweat too, apparently:

“Aspirations – is that like sweat on my butt?” Cruz, then a high school student in Houston in 1988, says while sitting in front of a water fountain, according to the video, which was posted online over the weekend.

“No, no. Oh, I see, what I want to do in life. Well my aspiration is to, uh, oh I don’t know, be in a teen kid film,” a lanky Cruz continues, mentioning someone off screen.

“Well, other than that, uh, take over the world – world domination. You know, rule everything, rich, powerful, that sorta stuff,” the 18-year-old Cruz adds.

1988? Heck, I was twenty-five at that time and still probably would have laughed at Cruz’ pun on “aspirations.” (At 52 … I have no comment.) Not only is this just a look at awkward teen years, it’s clearly also awkward teen humor. Goodness gracious, if these are the worst jokes Cruz told in his teen years, I’d be disappointed. This predates the MTV series Beavis and Butthead by about five years, so perhaps Cruz can even say he was ahead of his time, and more intellectual to boot.

Last week I gave the Washington Post’s Callum Borchers a hard time for falling into a media trap on a “journalist registration” bill in South Carolina, but he gets this one right. This viral video is contagious only for the yawn it will produce:

“Prepare to be disappointed.” That should be the mandatory disclaimer on all teenage Ted Cruz video stories.

Don’t get us wrong: There are so many good ingredients that you would think you were in for something delicious. Instead, you get something akin to Funyuns and cream cheese, which — no matter what BuzzFeed tells you — really isn’t very good. At all. …

So why even share the video in the first place? Well, as I said, there are some ingredients here that often produce tasty results. This is never-before-seen footage, which permits the media to use words like “unearthed.” For something to be “unearthed,” it must first be buried, and why are things in politicians’ pasts buried? Because they are potentially embarrassing or harmful, right? The fact that this tape comes from an anonymous former classmate further suggests that Cruz wouldn’t want voters to see its content. Why else would the source refuse to reveal his or her identity?

Plus, we’re all inherently curious to find out what a public figure was like before he learned to control his image. Watching a three-decade-old video of Ted Cruz in an unguarded moment seems like a good way to learn a bit about what he is really like.

Too bad the darn thing turned out to be so generic. And too bad the reason why the footage was buried for so long is likely because it was on a dusty VHS in someone’s attic — a VHS that no one bothered to convert to a digital format until now because it’s just not that interesting.

Yes, politician acted like a teenage boy when he was a teenage boy isn’t very compelling. However, that didn’t stop the national media from clutching at their pearls when accusations of prep-school hazing came out against Mitt Romney in 2012, as though that meant anything about a man 50 years down the road. Meanwhile, no one bothered to make much of an issue about the whereabouts and activities of Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton on the night of September 11, 2012 when four Americans lost their lives in Benghazi waiting for an American response that never came. And our intrepid media still doesn’t seem terribly interested in that part of the story, even though Hillary’s now running to be Commander in Chief.

Maybe we could use a little more world domination after all.