In the annals of bad political driving, the Rubios do not even merit a footnote. The standard case study was Senator Edward Kennedy, but one of the examples that stands out in my mind is that of George Stephanopoulos — who, when he was running the Clinton White House, managed to get himself arrested for leaving the scene of an accident and driving with an expired license after failing to negotiate a parking space in front of a bar in Georgetown. He popped a bunch of mints; there was no drunk-driving charge. I remember the episode because of one detail: Stephanopoulos was driving an old Honda CRX, which I found disappointing at the time — I’d assumed that senior White House advisers drove better cars.

Whether Mrs. Stephanopoulos — the comedienne Alexandra Wentworth, a sense of humor being needful in her situation — has had any tickets in the past 20 years is not to be gleaned from the pages of the New York Times. In fact, the Time’s interest in the travel habits of the spouses of presidential candidates is a bit . . . uneven. Mrs. Rubio’s traffic violations are news that’s fit to print, but the self-proclaimed newspaper of record has taken scanty interest in the peregrinations of former president Bill Clinton aboard an airplane nicknamed The Lolita Express, bearing him to a destination with an even worse nickname — “Pedophile Island” — in the company of Jeffrey Epstein, today a convicted sex offender. There are some aspects to that story that are considerably more interesting than failure to come to a complete stop: Clinton traveled in the company of a pornographic actress (her business is listed in Epstein’s records as “massage”) and many times in the company of Sarah Kellen who — you’ll have to go to Gawker for this, as the Times must yawn — “was believed by detectives in the Palm Beach Police Department, which was the first to start unraveling the operation, to be so deeply involved in the enterprise that they prepared a warrant for her arrest as an accessory to molestation and sex with minors. In the end, she was never arrested or charged, and federal prosecutors granted her immunity in a 2007 non-prosecution agreement that described her as a ‘potential co-conspirator’ in sex trafficking.”

If there is a Times reporter willing to press Herself on these facts, he is being kept at a safe distance.