I could care less what Mike Bennett, the man, views or watches — whether it’s actual or perceived porn or not — (care to say which of these is pornographic: PETA’s attention-grabbing hijinks on a West Palm Beach city street; Desperate Housewives; Siesta Beach during Spring Break; or The L Word.)

Hey, whatever floats the boat.

But I do think it’s reasonable to care what the Senator Mike Bennett is doing, watching, viewing, reading, while on Senate time (read taxpayer time) on the Senate floor (read taxpayer-paid-for-floor), with a Senate-supplied (read taxpayer supplied) computer, when he should — if he had a strong work ethic and sense of responsibility to the people who pay for his position — be listening intently or at least as intently as possible given his propensity for boredom while on the Senate floor.

“I was just sitting there, bored as they were debating the abortion bill,” Bennett reportedly said.

Ah, bored by the abortion debate. Would that all his constituents, especially the female ones, had that same luxury.

Interestingly, it was a female friend who sent Bennett the photo of the bikini-clad beach babes.

More interestingly, and sad, is the awareness that if Bennett and his female friend, and the media coverage of the unfortunate missive and mess, are any accurate reflection of the American public, then we are indeed a citizenry living lives of not-so-quiet desperation.

Because if nothing else, doesn’t the expenditure of time in creating the email with the photo attachments, the Senator’s boredom, the media attention, and the ensuing explanations from Bennett and his female friend, doesn’t it all just smack a little too sweatily of desperate times and desperate minds?

Desperation in the career, in the intellect, in the humor, in the media’s prurience, and even in the oddball defense of self — because certainly self-described penchants for boredom and vulgarity do not exactly paint an inspiring picture of a statesman and his coterie. Isn’t this all evidencing a particularly rueful kind of bourgeois mentality?

But, to be fair, the woman in question has publicly disabused us all of the notion that she and the Senator might share anything as bright as wit or as light as whimsy — when she described herself, — and the Senator as well — as possessing and sharing nothing more than “a ribald sense of humor.”

Ah, ribaldry. If you had to look the word ribald up in the dictionary, you’d discover that the word means vulgar, coarse, or crude.

We know times are desperate indeed for the English language and the American sense of humor when the kind of listless banality that the Bennett email represents is gussied up as ribaldry.

If the Senator and his lady friend are true fans of the ribald, perhaps next time she’d be better off emailing him outtakes from Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.