Your boss has to be smarter and better organized and more real-world centered than anyone else in the office.

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received as a budding young entrepreneur was from the CEO of a company for whom I consulted. "You know you're successful when everyone working under you is smarter than you."

So I wouldn't go so far as to say that Fw'd Off's boss has to be smarter than anyone else in the office. A head of a company, a community, a tribe or any other social group can maintain all kinds of personal superstitions and still be successful, as long as they retain their ability to impart vision, inspire enthusiasm, and (most importantly) remove the obstacles that obstruct their underlings.

(In fact, the "smartest one in the room" syndrome is often antithetical to leadership, as it encourages tyranny.)

So Cary Tennis may be right — it may be that Fw'd Off has to move on, but if so it's not necessarily because of the boss per se. If the chain emails drive Fw'd Off up the wall that badly, then it points to a basic incompatibility between employee and employer — which is what I take as the real issue.

An unoriginal conception of this article would have of course made a big deal out of Bill Clinton. No other candidate's spouse can claim to have anything close to his resume, after all, let alone the stark publicity of the scandals surrounding his personal life. Who else has had their romantic affairs investigated by the US Congress?

But Rebecca Traister coolly gives Clinton's husband a "B+", as if to say, "nice work, but you know, none of your attention-getting antics ever involved fatally cutting open and then stapling live animals." The title graphic doesn't even show Clinton, which in a sense would have been redundant — we've already seen his face, we know what he looks like, he's probably one of the more recognizable living people in the world.

Traister establishes the goal of her piece early on — to dish! — and sticks to her guns. Ignore the inevitable complaints about relevance, Editor, and do consider this to a perfectly executed treatment.

... the former New York mayor simply isn't telling the truth when he says he wasn't informed about Kerik's lapses

Woah! Crazy talk! Perhaps Joan Walsh should tone down her rhetoric, and re-read Gary Kamiya's article on politeness. She may as well have written that "the former New York Mayer is as usual lying through his teeth, lying like a rug, lying like his dead grandma when he says he didn't know that Bernie Kerik is as crooked as a 13 dollar bill."

Seriously, it's nice to see Giuliani's penchant for bullshit being called something a little more forceful and honest than "a misstatement" or even "misleading."

He's only endured a sliver of the scrutiny Clinton has over her two decades in national politics. We'll see how he handles the attention in the weeks to come.

It's unlikely that he ever will, unless an army of letter writers and a flock of video ad producers work continually to keep the attention of the national media on this bozo. It doesn't matter whom he runs against — he'll get a free pass if the mainstream press is permitted through inaction to give him one.

She also details a year-old study finding that in speed-dating men value looks over smarts and avoid women they perceive to have superior intelligence.

I'm reluctant to bother spending any time on a study that Maureen Dowd finds interesting, but I do have to wonder how this differs from the behavior of women in speed dating. I have no vast experience in the field but I have had occasion to date more than a few women (a number of them lawyers, come to think of it) who certainly judge first and foremost by appearance, and are often put off by signs that their companion is other than "pleasingly simple" (to put it nicely).

A mean way of reading the gender politics here would be that when men value looks it's considered tawdry, yet we give women a pass because they are (we assume) performing a subtle, sophisticated, and above all non-objectifying examination of their date's suitability as a long-term mate.

But before we condemn anyone, and fall into an unproductive gender war, let's not forget what Oscar Wilde had to say on the subject:

"People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so, but at least it is not so superficial as thought is. ... It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances."

As it applies to politics I'm sure that's a principle that Clinton understands very well. Whether she can ever master her appearance remains to be seen.

And as for "dating" — chromosomal compatibility aside, what do you call "having a beer with"?

While going after "the kids and their damn music" is typical Anglo-American conservative reaction these days, it strikes me that a generation ago the same sorts of guys who were in complete denial about how widespread sexual assault is to begin with.

So in some sense, aren't we seeing a significant hurdle already overcome in Tracy Clark-Flory's steep climb upward?

Best wishes to Sidney Blumenthal, and to everyone devoting their personal time and energy to the forthcoming election.

That includes everyone in Salon's letters section, right? Because nobody with anything to complain about is going to just sit on their asses and and not get involved ..

.. right?

Blumenthal's all too brief stint at Salon did credit to him and to the magazine. I hope it will be au revoir, and not farewell.