POP QUIZ: WHAT’S THE LATEST MEDIA EXPOSE ABOUT?

Yep, you answered correctly. So if you want 5,500 words on what a monster Mitt Romney was that one time at band camp, the Washington Post is your paper. I wanted to link to their investigative stories on Obama’s time at Punahou (and Columbia and Harvard and Chicago and, uh, D.C.), but I can’t seem to find them.

5,500 word articles (and including the headline, that’s a pretty close word count by Ricochet’s Mollie Hemingway; I double-checked by pasting the article into Microsoft Word and using its counter) don’t happen overnight, at least judging by my speed when I was routinely cranking out 2,000 and 3,000 word magazine articles at a clip. You have to round up the interview sources, talk to them on the phone or in person, transcribe their quotes, and then the editors have to vet the piece, it gets rewritten, restructured, polished, etc. Presumably, this piece has been in the works for sometime, as part of the Post’s expected series of hits on the candidate with the (R) after his name. (See also: George Allen in 2006, the Post’s obsession with Bob McDonnell’s college thesis in 2009, the Post’s non-obsession with Obama’s college-era past in 2008 and 2012, etc.)

At Hot Air, Ed Morrissey adds that Romney wisely apologized for his high school hijinks 47 years ago, rather than debate the charges:

Politically speaking, this was the smart thing to do. Other campaigns would have tried challenging the veracity of the stories and/or the motives of the witnesses, but that’s a losing proposition.  The more a campaign debates those points, the longer the story goes, and the more legitimacy it has in the media. Instead, the Romney campaign made it an old story before it began to grow legs by just expressing remorse over any cruelty that may have taken place in high school.

I eagerly await the next set of stories about how in middle school Romney refused to give cuts in line to kids from low-income families, or how he shamelessly violated the “exies-no-erasies” rule in elementary school with his female classmates.

Yesterday, Hot Air contributor Mike Rathbone writes that he’s happy that Obama has decided to roll out the gay marriage issue now rather than as a Hail Mary play in the fall:

I also urged Team Romney to put pressure on the President so that he would announce in May or June and not September or October. Now that that has happened (more thanks to the MSM than Team Romney, but a win’s a win), this issue plays itself out over the next month (what else is the MSM going to talk about). If Romney doesn’t get drawn into a back-and-forth over this issue, it will be pretty much dead by June, especially when the May unemployment rate comes out. Then we can all (try to) focus on Wreckovery Bummer: With A Vengeance.

Or to put it another way, “That’s nice; now what about jobs?

RELATED: Via Sarah Hoyt’s post below, “Young Obama Bullied….A Girl.” He did far worse things to Lassie, as well.

More from Jim Treacher: “If you went to grade school with Mitt Romney and he dipped your pigtails in an inkwell, contact David Axelrod immediately.”