That’s the New York Times’s description of our times, in a profile today of Delaware Republican primary winner Christine O’Donnell, noting that “even” in this period of political woolliness, “Ms. O’Donnell emerges as a striking departure from the typical Senate candidate.”

(Yes, the word “masturbation” makes the Times’s lede — and the AP’s, and Politico’s— though it is nowhere to be found in the Wall Street Journal’s getting-to-know O’Donnell piece.)