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    Volume CCXXXIII, Number 33        May, 2003              Page 3

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Publishers for years have raked in the old mazooma by peddling home-decorating books featuring scary middle-aged women whose taste was much better than those of the unwashed clutching $24 in small bills. Those publishers have also done well with books by rejected middle-aged women bitching about their lousy ex-husbands who failed to appreciate their womanly wonderfulness and instead ran off with their aerobics instructor, baby-sitter, or lap dancer.

So let's give some points for creativity to Scribner's and Ms. Browning, who, like the makers of Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, have combined two great tastes that taste great together: condescension and depression. Ms. Browning was apparently married to the world-famous journalist and Harvard Crimson editor, Phil Weiss. [Factcheckers, please confirm – Copy Ed.] [I thought Weiss was the dead one. – Ed.]

Anyone who has ever been romantically intertwined with a Crimson editor knows how painful the breakup can be, and it's likely her fellow waitresses at Mr. Bartley's have heard about it, too. But plucky Ms. Browning chose to transform her anger and depression into a creative frenzy of futzing around her house. Now she wants to share her secrets with you, and charge you $24, to boot. For a lot less, you could hear pretty much the same thing at Mr. Bartley's, and get a darned good burger deluxe too.

War criminal emeritus Henry Kissinger, having rewritten history in his endless mendacious memoirs, now recuts the same whoppers in yet another effort to obscure his pointless expansion and prolongation of the Vietnam War. According to Henry, his brave sacrifice of tens of thousands of American lives (not to mention hundreds of thousands of Asian ones) was the price that someone else had to pay for the phony detente he tried to engineer.

The absurdity of this twaddle is evident to anyone with any memory or knowledge of this grim era – the Chinese would have been perfectly happy to talk to U.S. diplomats on any given day after 1949 had not Nixon and his fellow travellers (to use one of Dick's favorite phrases) threatened Democrats with political suicide had they done so.

In the world according to Henry, the war was prolonged not by his secret and disingenuous campaign to scourge not only Vietnam but the rest of Indochina, but by liberals, psychiatrists and all the other demons named by Nixon when what he really meant was "Jews." Naifs like Marvin Kalb and Walter Isaacson may have been taken in by Kissinger's imperial talent for shovelling it, but as for us, we think the late, great Joseph Heller had history's verdict on Dick Nixon's partner in prayer: "He ain't no Jew."

She was just another rich, happy, dope-smoking Princeton girl who became the wife of perhaps the least loathsome Arab dictator (not a particularly fast league). Now you can share her heartwarming riches-to-riches story, as she moves from one bankrupt principality (Pan Am) to another (Jordan).

No, it's not a Disney Channel TV cheapie (although, since it's published by Disney satrap Miramax, it soon will be), it's true. Her beloved, King Hussein of Jordan, having been installed in power by the British and propped up by the Americans, brings his miserable country from the 8th to the 16th Centuries in just 40 years.

Of course, Queen Noord [Surely, Noor? – Ed.] missed out on some of the less romantic moments of the King's reign, like his use of Jewish gravestones as latrines (hell, they were cleaner than anything else in Jordan at the time) or his invasion of Israel, intended to capitalize on Israeli preoccupation with their invasion of the Sinai.

But that was then and this is now. The Jordanian Army was chased from the West Bank, King Hussein mellowed in later life (but sadly never grew), and thanks to the King and his Princeton Queen, there are at least ten working flush toilets in Jordan today not made from Jewish gravestones.