Before anyone colors me insensitive, I would like to state for the record that I feel bad when a pretty young white girl goes missing. I feel bad when a white girl who is uglier than original sin goes missing. Come to think of it, I don’t like it when anyone disappears and loved ones suffer, regardless of race, creed or pretty young white girl status.

But with the relentless coverage marking Missing Pretty Young White Girl in Aruba, Day 26, enough is enough. I’m sick of news networks — Fox News by far being the biggest culprit — leading off with this as the top story. There’s a war on, and I’m sorry, 160,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan in my eyes trumps a drunken high school senior trip gone wrong.

Americans know Natalee Holloway and “runaway bride” Jennifer Wilbanks, but let me ask you this: Who is Paul R. Smith? Give up? He’s the first Medal of Honor winner to come out of Iraq. He gave his life to save his platoon, and his story is extraordinary.

But Sgt. 1st Class Smith takes a back seat to a party-hearty teenager and a bride with a criminal record and a few loose screws in the Pantheon of Who’s Who in America. Let’s talk about why this is, and why I’m not watching the news again until Fox, CNN and others get this trash off of my TV set.

I have pontificated ad nauseum here at Rathergate about perspective, i.e. what merits serious coverage and what does not. For example, fired New York Times Executive Megalomaniac Editor Howell Raines won praise (and a boatload of Liberal Medals of Honor Pulitzer Prizes) for “Portraits of Grief,” his newspaper’s “flood the zone” coverage of every single victim of Sept. 11. But when he decided that an all-male country club was more newsworthy than the run-up to the Iraq war, North Korea nuclear ambitions and other earth-shaking matters, his same “flood the zone” coverage garnered him and the Times some well-deserved ridicule.

So let’s put the Natalee Holloway case in perspective. Aruba is about the size of Washington, D.C. and has a population of 71,566, according to the July 2005 update of the CIA World Factbook. Many U.S. suburbs have more inhabitants.

Aruba’s crime rate isn’t even close to the rest of the world, hence its popularity as a tourist destination — 641,906 tourists visited the island in 2003, according to the Aruba government’s Web site. I’d wager that Aruba is safer than Orlando, Kissimmee-St.Cloud and the other cities of the Disney metroplex.

As for further perspective, a boatload of facts and figures are available from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as to how many children disappear each year.

So one must ask, why does Holloway’s case merit so much attention? Sorry to say, it just doesn’t. There is an angle that a disappearance isn’t supposed to happen in such a safe place, but the media blew that wad weeks ago.

Former NBC anchor Tom Brokaw didn’t mention Holloway or Aruba, but he hit the nail on the head the other day in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Brokaw, a pillar of strength during 9/11, says Americans “have lost track that we’re in a war.

“It has slipped off the radar screen, in part, because we haven’t been hit since 9/11. It seems like people are back worrying about their personal finances and what may happen to Social Security.”

Soldiers are dying in Iraq every day as we rebuild the country and root out terror cells. Just the other day U.S. troops liberated a terrorist torture center in Iraq and found manuals on how to choose your hostage and “rules for cutting off the heads of infidels” (hat tip Opinion Pundit, via Michelle Malkin). But what has led off the news for the past few days? The Pretty Missing White Girl Watch.

And we scratch our heads and wonder why so many people are in a hissy fit because the Guantanamo Bay Country Club doesn’t offer detained terrorists a tennis court, back massages and a morning halal mint on the pillows. We’ve forgotten we’re in a war, and it’s because the media, both liberal and conservative, have forsaken their obligation to keep relevance in mind.

This never-ending media circus, complete with breaking news whenever someone is arrested (which means next to nothing under Dutch civil law — you can be arrested because the police want to talk to you), is worthless in the long run.

Worse than that, it’s bias by commission — these endless stories are painting a small tourist island as a deathtrap. Didn’t a boy earlier this month die on a ride at Disneyworld? Imagine a month of endless stories — you’d think that Disneyworld was Fallujah with a talking mouse and a duck in a sailor suit.

These 26 days of endless coverage can be boiled down into one sentence that no one in the media has dared to mention — it’s not a good idea to go out solo and drink underage in a foreign nation where your language is not the lingua franca (perhaps bringing along chaperones that know what they’re doing is a secondary point). The only thing that this saga is good for is something to point at the next time someone says that underage drinking has no negative consequences.

Malkin is appearing on Fox News Live at 2:40 p.m. Eastern time to discuss “Aruba, Rove, and Oprah.” If she has the time or inclination to mention a nobody like myself, maybe she can pass on that I haven’t watched Fox in weeks because of this “all Natalee, all the time” palaver.

I’ll come back to the “fair and balanced” news channel once it returns to being relevant as well. I pray that this story has a happy ending, as unlikely as that may be, but I’m sick of hearing about it.

Had Natalee Holloway been black and 30 pounds overweight, Americans would be saying “Natalee who?” and would not be able to find Aruba on a map.