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Thursday is a special time for Washington Post readers -- it's Tina Brown day. If there's ever been a sillier sharper super snob in newsprint, I've not yet come across him, er, her. She's a Brit, of course, now living in New York, probably dreaming that Tom Wolfe might still write a novel about her. Briefly, in her U.S. career, she saved (if that's the word for it) Vanity Fair, vulgarized the New Yorker while serving as editorial groupie to Bill Clinton, moved on to an even more ambitious undertaking with Talk, which blew up in her face. Then a chat show on cable that drew fewer viewers than a typical act at Hyde Park Corner, leaving her with only thing to do: write about herself and the "values" and politics of her Charlie Rose set. Who'd have thought that such a dynamo would end up doing her best work as a catty scribbler.

Today, with a few surprises thrown in, however tendentiously, mainly about Lady Thatcher (all those years in New York seem to have Brown missing the UK something fierce), she does some predictable bashing of Harriet Miers and psychologizing of George W. Bush and the women who serve him. She's exemplifies smartness at its most empty. Predictably, she loves to slander religion.

"The bleakest detail of Miers's résumé is that her decision to accept Jesus Christ as her savior took place at the office."

"She had shattered every glass ceiling of the Texas bar, only to be waiting alone after hours for her old pal Judge Nathan L. Hecht to pad down the corridor from his office with a consoling Bible and the promise of being born again."

But Tina does seem to like Germany's new chancellor, Angela Merkel, because she "didn't need Geena Davis's lips to become her country's commander in chief. Nor did she need the patronage and protection of some powerful male. Dour, forthright and serious, Merkel did it all by herself..." What, no slurs about Merkel's upbringing as the daughter of a stern Lutheran minister? I guess, in proper Upper East Side fashion, all shots must be directed at American targets.

topics:
Bill Clinton, Religion