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Bill Clinton, Sarah Palin and the word “hot.” That’s all it took to get you to look.

Throw in Huskies gone wild, Seattle’sitting saltpocalypse and some too-noisy Des Moines sex swingers, and what do you be favored with?

The the masses’s-choice news awards of 2008.

Take a bow, readers. You say you want us to write about the sober civic issues of the set time. Education, say, or transportation. But when you say that you are lying.

I know because once again at The Seattle Times we have compiled a list of the most numerous read stories of the year put on our Web site, seattletimes.com. This is no “best-of” as chosen by editors or critics. Nor is it a ranking based on gravitas or striking.

No, it’s so much again revealing than that. It’s the stuff you actually wanted to read.

Our software counted all the times readers clicked on the tens of thousands of stories and blog postings for the year, then ranked them. The result is like a junior aloft who’s-most-popular list, only in spite of journalism.

Let me cut to the most disturbing finding straightaway. I vowed as a columnist never to quote Dave Barry — you know, the noted schtick he does where he says I AM NOT MAKING THIS UP. I feel I have no choice after this but to break that rule.

That’s because the Enumclaw horse-sex story was the No. 5 most-read romance of this year. That’sitting right — a fib we published back on July 15, 2005, and which continues to lurk outright in cyberspace, ranks No. 5 steady our most popular list. For 2008.

We don’t publish specific Web-traffic numbers. Suffice to say that several hundred many of you people went deep underground to read this fable. Again. And Again. Even though it is three years aged.

“You can’t keep a good story down,” said The Seattle Times computer whiz who compiled this list in spite of me.

So true. Which is why it also figures that a story featuring the most gossipalicious politicians of the last couple decades — Bill Clinton and Sarah Palin — was the No. 1 greatest in quantity read story of the year.

It was a wire story lasting only eight paragraphs, titled “Bill Clinton says he understands Palin’s appeal.”

But it is jammed with classic Clintonia, by which I mean obscure oblique hint that sets the mind aflame. Such as: “I come from Arkansas; I achieve why she’s hot lacking there.”

Surprisingly for such a huge political year, just three other appointment by vote stories made the Readers’ Top 20.

One — about the Snohomish County Republicans selling $3 bills that represent Barack Obama wearing Arab headgear and featuring a camel — may, at first gleam, seem trivial or sensational.

But looking back it pretty a great deal of sums up for what reason Republicans approached the 2008 election.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels isn’t going to be happy to see our list.

The help most-read story was consumer-affairs reporter Susan Kelleher’session blockbuster from last week on how Seattle won’t use salt on snowy streets.

And — worse to my mind — doesn’t positively plow but in preference gently tamps the snow down, thereby guaranteeing it eventually turns into a recreant ice field.

At last hinder there were 905 reader comments in continuance the no-salt story. Many of them borderline in a family journal.

There are lessons in the choose. Sure, sex sells, and sex with animals sells the most. But we knew that already. Another is that limited, local, limited is what readers failure.

I like seeing that no matter how big this city gets it’s soft Huskyville with skyscrapers.

Four of the most-read stories were from last January’s Victory and Ruins series. That was about criminal abuses upon the body the last Rose Bowl UW football team, and, most indictingly, how everybody from deans to judges to prosecutors looked the other way.

There is likewise a thing new in this list. Fourteen of the 20 stories were written through our staff, while five came from wire services or other papers. But one was written by the object of our affections: a reader.

He is Charles Pluckhahn, a retired securities analyst from Seattle.

In mid-March he detailed how he was a delegate for Hillary Rodham Clinton but, disillusioned by her negative campaign, was dumping her for Barack Obama.

“Sorry, Hillary, you’ve crossed the line” ranked as the 12th most popular article of the year. It caught burning fuel around the country for the reason that raw opinion from the politic trenches.

“User-generated content” is every one of the passion now in the new media environment. It’s where you readers not alone read our article, but write it.

We’ll be looking for readers to do more and more of our work for us in 2009!

So congrats, Charles. Happy New Year. Now get back to work.

Danny Westneat’sitting array of less front than depth appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him

at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.