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Published: Tuesday, Jan. 08, 2013 / Updated: Monday, Jan. 07, 2013 03:57 PM

Oh, baby!

Maybe the Mayans were right.

On a recent morning, the deal to settle the so-called Fiscal Cliff had been brokered, Hillary Clinton was in the hospital with a blood clot and heavy snows were piling up in the Midwest and Northeast.

But guess what? It took me 20 minutes to hear about those passing tidbits while the morning anchors broke a much bigger story and hashed out the details with experts. This earth-shattering news? Kanye West and Kim Kardashian are expecting!

That’s right, two of society’s biggest attention seekers are going to procreate and this announcement was more important than a senior official being hospitalized or a drastic tax situation that affects almost all of us being averted? Those pesky Mayans went for the figurative translation that the world was ending.

Maybe Kanye West has some musical talent, so we’ll cast him aside for this portion of my rant, but aren’t we the least bit ashamed at our plummeting IQ rates when the list of people who are nothing but stains to acceptable values are made into megastars? The Kardashians have built an empire on doing nothing of note to attain fame other than starring in a sex tape and having a deceased father who defended OJ Simpson.

Honey Boo-Boo paves the way for any exploited child to keep riding the failed dreams of a sleazy parent. I don’t think you have to be an opera snob to wonder where the comedy is in seeing a redneck child manipulated by a mother that looks like a thumb with stubby appendages. The entire cast of “The Jersey Shore ” (now, thankfully, off the air) was an unforgivable mess in which fake tanning until you are orange and passing out in your own vomit is glorified to the point where they raked in millions.

Do you know who is responsible for these atrocities to society? We are! And it just keeps getting worse.

The “Real Housewives ” series is so successful it seems to add a new city each year where spoiled rich people can flaunt their ignorance with the same panache as they do their silicone parts. “The Bachelor ” keeps riding high in the ratings as potential suitors lie, cheat and sleep their way to finding a supposed soul mate, even though the “winners” never seem to actually marry in the end.

But we keep watching. We feed the bellies of lazy TV executives who keep putting out buffets of stupid.

In the wake of recent tragedies I have been asked if morals are declining. I do not know. I’m fairly certain that respect and decorum are out the window, however. Proper decorum wouldn’t have had a paparazzi so eager to snap Justin Beiber’s photo that he would get run over by a car and killed.

If people truly held respect as a virtue, there’s no way they’d celebrate idiocy by waiting excitedly for the latest tweet from any of the Kardashian clan. We would denounce fools. We would ignore tools. Our lack of interest would force creativity instead of relying on the lowest common denominator for entertainment.

When NBC and ABC consider Kim Kardashian being pregnant as important news, there’s a problem. Somewhere, a Mayan god is smiling.