BEST HEADLINE I EVER READ!

Certain headlines long outlive their newsworthiness. In fact, they become as famous as the stories they're about:

"Ford to City: Drop Dead"

"Headless Body in Topless Bar"

"Sid Vicious is Dead"

Those NYC tabloid headlines -- screaming from newsstands back when people actually had to buy newspapers from them -- didn't just report history but made history. They neatly summed up events in a few verbs and nouns and stuck in people's brains for years, decades afterwards. I wasn't old enough (or even alive) when they first ran but, NYC history junkie that I am, I learned all about them.

There is one infamous headline, however, I clearly remember seeing. 

Just as we had entered a new decade, the 1990s, and just as yours truly had entered his tumultuous teens years, I recall walking past a newsstand where the ugly mug of a man who would one day terrorize this country through social media from the White House (social media even exist yet; heck, neither did the Internet). 

The headline proudly declared: "Best Sex I Ever Had." 

Seeing that nauseating headline, for me, was the beginning of the end of my childhood. What was this all about? Why was this on the front page? Why is this in our lives?

How that infamous headline was created -- and how informs so much of what we're living with today -- is the subject of this article by the person who wrote it. It'll make you either laugh or cry or wonder ... what has this country done to itself?

And who knew then that it was just forerunner to what is possibly the greatest political scandal since Watergate?