Just look at what's made national news during the last fortnight or so.

First, a New York Times columnist devotes three columns to caricaturing Las Vegas as an anthropomorphic emblem of misogyny ("city as predator") and ridiculing Mayor Oscar Goodman for supporting legal brothels in the downtown corridor. Las Vegas is a predatory city, Bob Herbert argued, one that preys on women. Put that in the chamber brochures.

Then, the spectacle of a Trial of the Century sequel surfaces when O.J. Simpson is accused of breaking into a Palace Station room with a posse that was packing. National news organizations go berserk. Wall-to-wall coverage ensues in Cableworld. What happens in Vegas goes around the world.

No longer is Las Vegas a destination resort. No longer are we a city with elite shopping and dining. Thanks to the paper of record and Orenthal James Simpson, we are now regressing, not just to Sin City but to tabloid sleaze.

Some of this was inevitable. You can cover the underbelly with a sheen of sizzle and sophistication, as the chamber and LVCVA do in marketing the town to businesses and tourists, respectively. But Las Vegas, at its core, is still what Herbert and the O.J. story reveal it to be: A place where sex is sought and where women are objectified as no other place in the country and a place where miscreants of varying degrees of fame come to disappear, party or, perhaps, commit hotel room invasions.

The "what happens here stays here" campaign is the most successful and recognized of all the LVCVA efforts over the years. The ads are as well made and clever as ever, full of humor and panache.

But while the slogan has become a totem for Las Vegas, it also reinforces the city as a place where you can get away with something that you can't in Peoria or Duluth. There has always been an undercurrent of sex, or at least sensuality, in the ad campaigns. But in this one, as opposed to, say, "The American Way to Play," there is a hint of something illicit, of conduct unbecoming anywhere but Las Vegas.

So despite the sensitivity of some to what Herbert sees as a local culture that is synecdoche for a countrywide resurgence of misogyny, the R-rated undercurrent is real, palpable. Does that mean Vegas treats women badly? Of course not. But if, as another local once said, image is everything, Herbert surely was not helpful.

Perhaps the chamber should post Herbert's columns right under this on its Web site: "Low unemployment, an expanding skilled labor force, an exceptional tax structure, a pro-business environment and a great climate has helped make Las Vegas the fastest-growing metro area in the nation since 1990!"

How about this addendum: And our mayor wants to have legal brothels, too!

The O.J. nonsense seems a poetic and further exclamation point on Herbert's trio of columns. Here in the city described as responsible for all sorts of depredations toward women, a man believed to be guilty of spousal abuse and murder of his wife is arrested and charged with breaking into a hotel room to retrieve or pilfer sports memorabilia.

And the reaction of so many is: Finally, he will get what's coming to him.

New slogan alert: Las Vegas — where O.J. finally met justice.

Maybe I should stick to my day job. Come to think of it, though, I may be jumping the gun on the negativity.

Tons of international publicity. The famous Vegas slogan used in different ways by many, many reporters trying to be cute. Weeks, maybe months of coverage with shots of the Las Vegas skyline, the Palace Station in the foreground but the Strip clearly visible.

Did I say a nightmare for the chamber and the LVCVA? Perhaps I meant a dream come true.