Through osmosis, I suppose, I keep absorbing “news” snippets about the feud between Rosie O’Donnell and Donald Trump. I don’t seek out this information; it finds me, kind of like plantar warts after a visit to the gym. This explains why I don’t go to a health club. Just as I don’t want a viral infection snaking toward the bone in my foot, I don’t want to be subjected to the latest exchange between a couple of egomaniacs with an overblown sense of their own importance in the world. I may have to stop watching television news as well as avoid the gym.

I hate to do that, really, because occasionally I glean from the TV news something interesting and useful, if not terribly important, such as that bit I picked up a while back about dust mites burrowing into a mattress and doubling the bed’s weight. There’s a new so-far-mite-free mattress in my home now, so it wouldn’t be an entirely correct assessment if I said the time I spent watching the segment represents 10 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back.

But the dust mites – and plantar warts, too – get more of my respect than this increasingly redundant kvetching between Trump and O’Donnell. What can either say that hasn’t already been said?

They’re too much. Only an arrogant narcissist would go about calling himself “The Donald,” as if he’s some kind of deity or is wearing a ring we should bend over and kiss. He needs a serious makeover, but not, as you might suspect, to correct a comb-over that is so bad that it makes him look a little like Cro-Magnon man. It’s a clue. The bad comb-over is a good metaphor for the man.

Even though Trump shouldn’t have called O’Donnell “a big fat pig” and only proved himself to be a bully by doing so, he didn’t miss the mark by far when he called her “a loser.” She is. He is. They are. And I’d rather snack on sandpaper than listen to her talk. Trump was right about her irritating voice. Even so, the biggest thing their tawdry little war of words has proved is that neither wealth nor fame buys class.

I wish they’d both shut up. Really. Just stop it. Right now. We don’t care, or if we do, we shouldn’t. Their rhetoric is like groundwater contamination. No one sees its poison until a plume is detected, and by then it’s too late to contain it.

The damage in this case, of course, is to our intelligence.

I suppose it’s hopelessly old-fashioned to yearn for a simpler time when Walter Cronkite or some other erstwhile anchorman told you how many people died in the war that day, or how many days U.S. civilians were held hostage in Iran or something else you probably didn’t want to know, but needed to. But, baby, the times they are a changin’ and the old standards of news judgment, such as relevance and importance, have been jettisoned as journalists look for news that is shocking, sensational and entertaining.

Still, even if you’re going to sandwich the O’Donnell-Trump spat between headlines about the more than 3,000 U.S. soldiers who have died in Iraq, the president’s call for 20,000 more troops to fight another country’s civil war, global warming, environmental degradation, genocide in Africa or other catastrophic happenings in the world each day, news directors and assignment editors everywhere ought to ask themselves this:

When two overexposed, self-consumed two-bit celebrities who can’t recognize their own irrelevance behave badly, is that news or is it simply what the world expects from them?

Beth Dalbey can be reached by e-mail at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.