As the Brilliant Bob Somerby points out to no avail the country cannot survive with a press corp as lazy and unintelligent as what gets to man the important media shows. Your friend Chris Matthews was a total disgrace in his interview on this book. He could talk of nothing substantive; but then he never does when there is any chance for him to get a thrill up his leg.

And oh yes, please point out to Evan Thomas that Ms. Lewinsky was not an intern at the time of her dalliance. It has become established pundit sex fantasy that Ms. Lewinsky was an intern and nothing will ever change that 'phony fact." You might as well say that she was "a high school girl" and it is true she was once in high school and a girl.

Your friend Chris does a disservice to progressive politics and rational discussion every time he shows up for passes for his work. Do you know if he ever reads anything before just blowing off what he last heard in the bar.

WHS

One reason there is no progressive response to the organized Republican riots and such is that your "good friend" Chris Matthews sees it as all quite funny and that he is just reporting the controversy. He spends endless time pretending to be a voice of reason and excoritation soft targets such as the "birthers" but permits his "friends" to speak utter nonsense about the health care issues. Once again "our liberals" go on his show and go right along with his politics is just a gong show. And I suppose it is for rich journalists who have jobs and health care.

Joan,

Your best friend Chris has always shown a deference to Mr. Delay. It was perhaps arguably understandable when Mr. Delay was in office and perhaps entitled to some indulgence. But,why now is Chris giving Delay the softbaall treatment. What, was Larry King not available to do the interview?

And your comment that Debbie Wasserman cleaned up the matter is not what I or even your colleagues saw. Rather than support Ms. Wasserman, the never miss a chance to demean a lady Chris, called her down for daring to say of Mr. Delay "consider the source."

No, your best friend Chris continues to be the phoniest of men. A man who plays favorites, courts those he thinks are powerful and beats up on a few women from time to time.

WHS

In High Fidelity, John Cusak goes to a party at the Chicago home of Charlie, his College Love who left him for another more "alive" person. After the party he realizes that Charlie is boring and that what he had in College was an infatuation.

Mr. Shapiro, as with David Brooks and a school bus full of childish cub reporters, had a crush on the man who was so good, so funny, so pure and so "all that and more."

They were so infatuated they never stopped to ask what he really believed. And so these incurious frat boys sat and ate the donuts and loved the stories about the Brazilian stripper and all those fly boy tales. They imagined, I suppose, that McCain was Tom Cruise and he came to love Kelly McGinnis after all. And they even told his stories for him: The silly tale that South Carolina was a place where his refusal to give up honor cost him the cockpit on Air Force 1. No one could bother to note the "race men" who ran his SC Campaign or that McCain went on to win primaries after SC. Such facts didn't fit.

And so today we listen as one silly reporter after another tells us as did David Brooks that "McCain is a really smart man, a very funny man when he is himself, and of course a victim of bad advice." McCain it seems holds fast to the notion that he should judged not by his actions but by what everyone just knows to the real McCain.

Mr. Shapiro fell in love with a dashing flyboy. Such romances, as some men and women come to know are not susceptible to logic, fact, observation and rational analysis. Unfortunately, it seems that reporters who were "on the bus" are still chasing the image they created when they were young and love was indeed just a pretty face.

Sad that.

The best thing Obama has done is not listen to the gentlemen whom best I can tell ran losing campaigns. Remember all the advise to "fight back" and all that malarkly. It seems that OBama has done quite nicely on his own, being calm in the face of the McCain attacks and not responding in kind. And the more he has responded to nonsense by pointing out in a polite voice that St. McCain does not want to face the facts of his party's failures the better he does.

And of my gosh, these deep thinkers have warned Obama not to get complacent. Who would have ever thought.

What next are you going to ask Bob Shrum how he would have run the campaign.

WHS

Dear Joan,

I appreciate your comments to Mr. Buchanan. However, were you being polite or do you really believe that his statments regarding Mr. Powell were "below" Mr. Buchanan. He has long been a holocaust denier and in the near past wrote another grim fairly tale about World War II and the way Hitler was forced into war and all that horrible stuff that goes with war.

Far from being beneath him, Mr. Buchanan's dismissive comments are entirely consistent with his history.

I suppose someone has to sit in a television studio with Mr. Buchanan.

WHS