For reasons that defy logic, I was watching the midnight rerun of “Hannity and Colmes” on Fox News after work last night, and they had former Bush aide Karl Rove on discussing Barack Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin.

Rove kept insisting that Obama has said people who wear the pin are not real patriots. Obama, of course, has said nothing of the kind – what he has said is that simply wearing the pin does not make one a patriot – but Colmes, the show’s left-wing voice, has no spine and didn’t challenge Rove’s inaccuracy.

But it wasn’t Rove’s deliberate twisting of Obama’s words that caught my attention.

What caught my attention was that Rove himself was not wearing an American flag lapel pin. And there also was no such pin on the lapel of GOP presidential candidate John McCain in a clip they ran from a recent campaign appearance.

Naturally, though, Colmes – probably the worst and weakest political talk show host who’s ever filled a TV screen -- didn’t bother to point out these obvious hypocrisies.

But I think the larger issue is this: The United States currently has a failing economy, two active wars, a constant terror threat, a collapsing real estate market, a mortgage crisis that’s costing people their homes, a credit crunch that’s wiping out personal savings, a health care system that leaves out millions of people and countless other problems that make this election incredibly important. Why, oh why, are the national news operations wasting their time on Barack Obama’s lapel, his middle name and what he wore during a visit to his ancestral homeland?