Um, Joan, a word about how to write an essay or review: Provide specific details to support your argument. (Neat idea, huh?)

For instance, you ridiculed the All Star Game's tribute to Willie Mays, but other than a mention of the pink Cadillac and your use of the word "desultory," you didn't give any sense at all of what the Mays tribute was lacking. Okay, so the Ted Williams celebration eight years ago was far more moving, but did you think to point out why? Was it that Williams was obviously dying at the time, whereas Mays is still able to walk, throw to a "catcher," and toss souvenir baseballs to the crowd? Was it something the broadcasters at the two events said or didn't say? WHY was last night's salute "disappointing" rather than "poignant"?

Care to share?

As I see it, there are two possible explanatins for why Bush won't get us out of Iraq any time soon:

A. He knows that pulling out while the country is in chaos will make him look bad, like a clueless loser who got himself and the entire country into a situation he/we did not understand--and he figures the best policy is to stall and rationalize until January 2009, then hand this nasty problem to his successor;

B. He defers all important decisions to Dick Cheney, who knew over a decade ago that the oil fields of Iraq needed to be "made secure" for American corporate interests, and who knows now that the invasion of Iraq truly will have proven pointless if we leave without guaranteeing ourselves perpetual oil access.

Take your pick, A or B. In either case, we ain't gettin' out until Cheney/Bush get out.

Oh, come on, Rebecca. We're leering and laughing at Lauren Caitlin Upton not because she's "young, pretty, blond, Southern and female" (thereby fitting into a convenient stereotype, as you would have it), but because her "reply" to the question was so astonishingly vacuous. As vacuous, in fact, as what we have heard far too often from another celebrity, but one who DOESN'T qualify as young, pretty, blond, or female--and is only marginally Southern--George W. Bush. Upton's absurd "explanation" at the pageant was as meaningless and unhelpful as so many of Dubya's have been; the main reason we can laugh over and over at her gaffe is that she probably won't ever have a chance to make her mark in or on the world, whereas our overachieving Prez has done extensive damage in his hours upon the stage, despite and because of his chronic cluelessness.

It's not a misogynistic impulse that causes such fascination with Upton's empty performance. It's alarm that now there are clearly at least TWO people in the country, one young and female, the other middle-aged and male, who have been given a chance to speak their minds publicly and had absolutely nothing to offer.

Glenn Greenwald seems to have enjoyed venting about how Tom Friedman facilitated Bush's invasion of Iraq. Greenwald is right--Friedman did support the invasion, and on dubious grounds--but the critique leaves out an essential item in Friedman's pre-war rationale: Friedman's know-it-all attitude at the time (late Winter and early Spring, 2003) was glaringly myopic.

Friedman tried to attach an asterisk to his approval of the invasion. He winked at all of us as he confided that the Bush administration's stated reasons for invading (WMDs, Saddam's ties to al qaeda) were just cover stories for the actual-and-legitimate reason (the planting of a democracy in the Middle East as a warning and example). Friedman said he didn't know whether the democracy experiment would succeed, because he didn't know whether it would be done right. But we ought to give it a chance, he said. It was a project that deserved our support.

What Friedman, in his presumptuous "inside story" wisdom, got so very wrong was that there was no way he or anyone else outside the administration could know just how strong Bush's commitment to that one favored cause might be. Was Cheney committed to the successful planting of a democracy? Was Rumsfeld? Did Bush even know what that meant? If there were still OTHER agendas--settling old scores for Bush 41; testing out Rumsfeld's smaller-fighting-force hypothesis; destroying the existing, overly comfortable arrangements between Iraq and China, Russia, France, Germany, et al.; or simply securing "our" oil from under "their" sand--what assurance could Tom Friedman give us that democracy-planting would be given the highest priority? No such assurance was possible, because the administration's values were not ultimately knowable. They had fabricated the headlined "reasons" for invading. How could we believe that their "real" motive, the one Friedman advocated for, would take precedence?

Friedman's Asterisk, his qualified support of a dishonestly advocated, flagrantly illegal invasion, was as naive and absurd as his current celebration of hypersteroidal-Cheney-Soprano "diplomacy." He thinks he's a lot more savvy than he really is.