We always thought of NBC's Andrea Mitchell as a prime example of the utter failure of television news departments to police glaring conflicts of interest, but apparently she is a gay icon!

In today's Observer, John Koblin explores Mitchell's secret gay fanbase—they seem to love her because she reminds them of all the Golden Girls, at once? And also because of balloons? There is really something here we're not quite getting.

Did she ever. We reached out to more people, and we got another call! This time it came from a 28-year-old gay man from Dallas named—wait for it—Wence Woolridge. He told us that he wasn’t even sure who Andrea Mitchell was, but …

“I actually saw her profile on another gay guy’s MySpace and I saw her picture and I was just drawn to it,” he said, as we began salivating. “I can’t say why, but I just instantly added her. I never really heard of her before and I can’t say I really know who she is. I just went for it.”

Mitchell is apparently a catty, campy Bette Midler, with DC as her bathhouse, or something. And the weird marriage to old toad Alan Greenspan is just icing on the cake! "You know, the beautifully aging diva shacking up with the powerful older man, and falling madly in love." Ok! We'd say the implication here is that Mitchell is Greenspan's beard, the Judy to his Vincente Minnelli, but would an empowered success story like Mitchell really live such a lie? Would she need to? (On the other hand, Greenspan did date Barbara Walters, which is a closet case red flag.) (Also, political journalism is a lot like a bathhouse, isn't it!)

But between this and the adulation, mentioned in the article, that New York gays felt for Hillary, adulation that only grew as her candidacy became more of a farce, we really have to ask our gay brothers to please be more discerning in choosing their new icons, because they're now just throwing their semi-ironic love at any powerful aging blonde diva. Where is the ultimately, inevitably tragic arc of their life stories?