Geez, listen to us all with our armchair strategy on both sides. The point is, invading or attacking Iraq is a terrible idea. Period. Push those little army battalions around on a map all you will, it doesn't matter. There is no victory to be had.

What no one seems to be addressing is that — I'd have to say miraculously considering the fiasco that is Iraq — the Bush administration is once again completely and utterly triumphant. As they did a few years ago, they've fabricated a "problem" out of smoke, paranoia and delusional thinking, then it made it incumbent upon others to come up with an alternate plan to deal with "The Problem." Oh, you don't have a solution? Well, then, shut up and let us handle this.

It runs like this: "Tell, me, Mr. Lefty, just what is your answer to the problem of Bigfoots running rampant and undocumented in the forests of the Pacific Northwest? Yeah, I didn't think so. Rampantly running Bigfoots are probably all just fine and dandy with you. I just wish we could all live in your little Candyland world."

Yes, even though they already led us into one debacle, using the exact same tactics and rhetoric, they've already conned us into talking about "the Iran problem," and now, on all sides the discussion is only about this strategy or that or if we go now, or later.

For Gods Sake! The Middle East might be the home of many problems, but the worst of these problems by far is the fact that we are so dependent on their oil (and it is, after all, THIER oil) and the neocon vision for how the region needs to be reshaped according to their will and their will alone, which they will call democracy.

I hereby change the terms of the debate. The Bush administration is the problem. Now it is incumbent on his supporters to come up with an alternate plan.

Heather is a great writer, but I sure don't envy her beat. There are so few shows that I can stand watching, and when I think of having to make my living by having something to say about them, well, uggh.

Whether it is this Brian show of which she writes, or any of the genre, the result is the same: a bunch of 30 somethings meet for brunch, as she suggests, or they jog, or shop, or walk in the park, or are painting their living room, or are meeting for dinner, or are at a bar trying to meet men/women or are doing any of a million other pieces of business, often all in the same supposed day, and it's quip, quip, quip, quip, quip quip, quip all the live-long day, but if you notice no one will ever laugh at someone's quip, or even crack a smile, and the person who says it will never say something like, "Hey, come on, that was a pretty good quip there."

No, they'll just quip. Reciting quip after quip as if the secret of the show really turns out to be that they are all, in reality, dead, and they now must go through eternity trapped in a hellish prision of compulsive quipiness forever and ever world without end.

For me, it's depressing realizing how much money writers are pulling down for all this, and not one of them seems to have the slightest clue of how to put together a sustained moment or sequence as exemplified by the Don Knotts clip.

I watch that show all the time, and I'm amazed how really funny a lot of it is, and not a quip in sight.

Q: When is a point not a point?

A: When there is no point!

What the hell is she talking about? What does it have to do with anything? Why is she so desperately, bitterly whiny?