Not having seen the movie, I anticipated from the headline that this would be a news piece on what's being said about "Munich" by the pundits.

It starts that way, but after that this piece is a counterattack to Brooks and Wieseltier, with every opinionated sentence phrased as though it were reporting unimpeachable fact.

It's also ironic that one of the first arguments Goldberg trots out is that Brooks and Wieseltier

are criticizing Spielberg for being "politically incorrect" -- when my experience as an non-party-line leftoid in the past three decades is that it is considered obligatory in leftish quarters to favor the Palestinians against Israel.

If you have to resort to discussing labels like "politically incorrect" as your first line of defense, it doesn't say much for the substance of your argument. And indeed, regardless of whether I ultimately agree with Wieseltier or not, it is to his credit that he presented reasons for his point of view rather than a polemic.

Brooks, Spielberg, Wieseltier, Goldberg . . . Let's call the whole thing off!

I think Mr. Tennis's advice for the letter-writer to find a new therapist is overly hasty.

The therapist probably explained about her marital troubles only to convey to the client a reason for her recent flakiness.

As for the flakiness, therapists are human and can go through hard times when their performance on the job is below par. That's not necessarily a good reason to fire the therapist immediately without giving her a chance to get back on track.

The therapists's giving advice to the client is not so unusual and not necessarily a breach of anything, as long as she does not mind if the client makes up her own mind as to whether she wants to follow said advice. (It's a strongly held belief in some quarters that therapists should not give advice, but I think that advice per se can be immenself helpful at times.)

The client suspects the therapist may not be OK with her possibly not following the advice. Well, I think she should find out before acting on a mere suspicion. And she should cut this otherwise very helpful therapist some slack before cutting and running.

I am heartened by this passage from Slack's article:

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Some teachers, such as Susan Sperling, an anthropology and interdisciplinary studies professor at Chabot College in Hayward, Calif., have adopted a version of [teaching the controversy]. She is trying to teach the controversy without granting undue legitimacy to I.D. as science.

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The thin guy wanna say iz, itt snaht an el stoopo thing too doo twanna gneau hauckumm, sinss cloassta all stuhphss we seez arownd us thatz rheel combobulated, day wuz ackshully pland by sumh intelijunt hyoomin bean oar sumpm . . .

. . . Hauckumm uthah stuhphss laik llah-eeph wudnt OLLSEAU pland bai sumkine intellijunt sumbuddy or uhthah??????

'SNAHT GUDENUFF tah jessay 'snaht sahnss n iggnaw it.

Poynt izz: 'Tsuh vallidh kwestshun!!!

WEA shood idhresss it heddahn. iz nessusserry tooe

gwintoo thuh fillahssuffy uvv howie maykh enlytundd choysuzz.

Ahmin antye-eye-dhee sahntyssk mahsellph. Bhutt, moass antye eye-dhee sahntyssks jesse dhyssmyss eye-dhee laik a neejurck re-ekshun -- and that ain

sahnss!

Gneau wunnurr ceau mennie peepil thynnh kheye-dhee mahtt bhee raht.

Page Rockwell, in her response to Harvard sophomore Virginia Fisher's sophomoric criticism of feminism, writes:

Fisher goes on to critique the "swarm" of criticism Harvard prez Lawrence Summers received from the "feminist hornet's nest" when he hypothesized that there are fewer female science professors because women as a gender may be less scientifically inclined.

No, not exactly. Summers offered three possible explanations for there being fewer female science professors at the highest echelons of academia. Here is part of what he actually said:

There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities . . . with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the . . . high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described.

(The "high-powered job hypothesis" is that, on average, women are less willing than men to accept a job -- like a professorship at a top-level research university -- that requires a time commitment of c. 80 hours/week.)

My point is simply that it is one thing to conjecture that a phenomenon may be due to Y, and quite another thing to conjecture that a more specific phenomenon may be due to X, Y, and/or Z.

The biggest mystery in this whole thing is Why?

Why does Salon choose to publish a response to a fairly silly rant by one sophomore?

(It couldn't be that she attends Harvard, could it?)

The piece includes this sentence:

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(Full disclosure: A piece of mine was picked for "Best Sex 2006," though after this review was written.)

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So . . . exactly how did this sentence end up in the piece if the information in the sentence was not known to the writer until after the piece was written? (:->)