Remember how the media left Barack Obama completely unvetted, ignoring even the most damaging stories from his past, while a squirming mass of reporters fought over every scrap of trash in the dumpster behind Sarah Palin’s house? It’s happening again.

For some reason, the New York Times decided to devote two reporters to the urgent task of reviewing Senator and presidential candidate Marco Rubio’s driving record over the past 18 years. And they still couldn’t make much of a story about it, so they decided to add his wife’s record to the story.

Voila! “Marco Rubio and His Wife Cited 17 Times for Traffic Infractions,” screams the headline. For some reason, the headline fails to mention that they had to dig back to 1997 to come up with that total. I’m sure it’s just a bit of editorial oversight that “… Over the Past 18 Years” was chopped off the headline.

What festers beneath the headline reads like a satire of a biased-media hit piece. Remember, as the following prose was tumbling off the word processor, the front-running Democrat candidate for 2016 is dealing with an endless string of payola scandals tied to phony charity and shell corporations, not to mention deleting a mountain of subpoenaed emails she was keeping on an illegal black-box server:

Senator Marco Rubio has been in a hurry to get to the top, rising from state legislator to United States senator in the span of a decade and now running for president at age 44.

But politics is not the only area where Mr. Rubio, a Republican from Florida, has an affinity for the fast track. He and his wife, Jeanette, have also shown a tendency to be in a rush on the road.

According to a search of the Miami-Dade and Duval County court dockets, the Rubios have been cited for numerous infractions over the years for incidents that included speeding, driving through red lights and careless driving. A review of records dating back to 1997 shows that the couple had a combined 17 citations: Mr. Rubio with four and his wife with 13. On four separate occasions they agreed to attend remedial driving school after a violation.

Mr. Rubio’s troubles behind the wheel predate his days in politics. In 1997, when he was cited for careless driving by a Florida Highway Patrol officer, he was fined and took voluntary driving classes. A dozen years later, in 2009, he was ticketed for speeding on a highway in Duval County and found himself back in driver improvement school.

Things got more complicated in 2011 when Mr. Rubio was alerted to the fact that his license was facing suspension after a traffic camera caught him failing to stop at a red light in his beige Buick. His lawyer, Alex Hanna, paid a $16 fee to delay the suspension and eventually it was dismissed.

On and on it goes. It’s as long as anything you’ll ever read from the mainstream media about, say, the White House Travel Office, Whitewater, or the sale of America’s uranium to Russia for Clinton cash.

Meanwhile, Hillary “Dead Broke” Clinton was being chauffered between luxury private jets and her two estates, perhaps occasionally glancing up from reading the latest “personal” email from her favorite donors, on the iPad she would later claim she wasn’t carrying, to watch the Little People buzz around in their cars and chuckle over how much time they waste behind the wheel.

I thought the media was adamant that the wives and children of politicians were strictly off-limits. But when their big “expose” on Marco Rubio could only find four traffic citations since 1997, they didn’t hesitate to drag his wife into the story. “War on Women,” anyone?

Is this going to be the first in a series? Will all of the chauffeurs for Madame Clinton and the prospective First Dude now be subjected to similar scrutiny? (State Department employees, as a class, have been known to build up some colorful driving records.) What about Bernie Sanders and the other Democrat hopefuls? If Lincoln Chafee got a speeding ticket, will it be reported in miles per hour, or kilometers per hour?

How about the Obamas? Actually, we already know how relevant the media considered their driving records…

If wives can be lumped together with husbands to produce headline-worthy ticket totals, how about children who are old enough to drive? Is this really the ideal moment for the liberal media to declare that candidates’ spouses are fair game? What’s the speed limit on Pedophile Island, anyway?

One thing is for certain: if the media can catch Marco Rubio in the act of illegally removing a tag from his mattress, he’s done.