Amid all the praise Dowd gets for hitting the right targets, and the dissing she's getting for the NYT Magazine excerpts, one thing has been forgotten: Dowd faked a quote about John Kerry, or passed it on as truth. She made a big deal about "Who among us does not love NASCAR?"--which Kerry never said.

The assistant to the previous Public Editor at the NYT told me that the NYT had received inquiries about Dowd's use of this spurious quote and then subsequent riffs on it in other NYT articles, but I never heard more from him and it certainly seems as if Dowd was not taken to task by her bosses. I guess they were too busy letting Judy Miller lead us into battle.

I can indeed dismiss her. Dowd popularized a faked quotation during the presidential campaign, claiming that Kerry made that ridiculous comment about NASCAR. The NYT ran with it, used it half a dozen times in different ways. The media bought it and spread it further, aiding and abetting the successful attempt to paint Kerry as rich and out of touch (unlike the poor, plebeian Bush). Dowd never apologized, the NYT never censured her for it.

I refuse to read her or take her seriously. That she had as much space as she did in the Magazine only proves it's what has long been said of that part of the paper: it's a "vast landfill of print."

Reading the letters here after the hilarious review, I'm glad that people who saw the original "Rent" found it as witless, tuneless, and gormless as I did. After having read one panegyric after another, I went expecting the re-invention of the American musical, a new age in American musical theater. I found it loud, stupid, boring, manipulative. It seemed 20-30 years old, musically: a Lawrence Welk version of rock music, tricked up in some middle-American incoherent fantasy idea of hipness.

I especially disliked the lead who went into a semi-crouch each time he belted out more inane lyrics. I couldn't tell what that was about, but I was ready to see somebody on-stage bitch slap him and make him stand up straight. One of the worst mannnerisms I've ever seen in a singer. I was dying to leave at intermission, but couldn't because this was a special charity event performance. Luckily my lover (and now-husband thanks to Canadian law) loathed it as much as I did and we spent the car ride home stunned by the hype. I grew up in New York and have never been so disappointed by a Broadway show.

She's a lousy, shallow actress, a boring interviewee, and even her looks are insipid.

The fixation isn't "ours," it's trumped up by the media desperate to sell copies of magazines.

Stop writing about people like this and get back to real cultural reporting.

I don't subscribe to Salon to read this kind of pap.

Thank you CP for telling it straight. The video and the first single were boring and the CD is weak for a Madonna album. It seemed cringe-worthy that Madonna felt she had to get street cred into her video with "ethnic extras," that she couldn't think of a better way to boost the song. It showed how weak the whole concept was--and what was up with those stockings?

But Ms. Paglia--where was Beautiful Bend and USA/European Express on your hot disco list? Talk about contemplation and trance.......

Sometimes going into therapy and trying to change your life and how you see it takes tremendous courage.

I should know. I live in spectacularly beautiful Michigan, and years ago experienced one of the most amazing views in the country when I crossed the bridge to the Upper Peninsula at sunset in late winter. More ice than you can imagine, a world of white everywhere turning to orange and then crimson.

Coming to Michigan and starting life over took courage for this born-and-bred New Yorker. But so has therapy, given that I grew up with parents who were Holocaust survivors. There are leaps you take in therapy that can make you feel like Butch and Sundance--or maybe Tarzan.

As for transcendence? I've published 17 books in many genres, and also published many 100s of reviews, articles, essays, short stories.

Sometimes I've found as much transcendence--or more--in writing as I have in losing myself in any natural setting, from Utah to Israel, the Dordogne to the Irish Sea.

Does that make me a whiny coward? I doubt it, since GK decided to write rather than stay out there on the ice.

I am a moderate. The party will not alienate me by attacking and toppling Lieberman. I will cheer its spine.

I still have not forgiven Lieberman, an Orthodox Jew, for attacking Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky. He publicly and disgracefully shamed the President, and Judaism teaches us that shaming a person is like a kind of murder. He helped create an environment in which anything could be said about the President, and was as despicable as the democratic Barons in the Senate who took on Clinton about gays in the military early in his first term.