- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Vogue? Hustler? Reader's Digest? What are your guilty reading pleasures? Discuss them in the Media area of Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Going for gold! By Inda Schaenen Women's sports magazines duel over a hot and growing target demographic (11/25/97) The Washington Post in decline By Harry Jaffe Newsroom bureaucrats suck life out of Washington Post (11/24/97) Hollywoodland By Catherine Seipp Hollywoodland for sale: O.J. house on the market (11/21/97) Big bucks for old books By Dwight Garner With this year's National Book Award, Charles Frazier wins -- and so do book collectors (11/20/97) Under the covers By James Poniewozik Holiday food mags push turkey porn (11/19/97) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVES

A R M C H A I R__P U N D I T S__T O__C L I N T O N bring us the head of saddam hussein! OR WE WILL DENOUNCE YOU AS A WIMP ON OUR INANE TV SHOWS! BY ERIC ALTERMAN | As Americans sit down to stuff themselves this Thanksgiving, they may give thanks that we still have elections in this country, and that, Pat Buchanan aside, most pundits know better than to risk their positions of perfect irresponsibility to run in them. If it had been up to the punditocracy, for instance, we would bombing the bejeesus out of Iraq right now. Although just what that might have accomplished, none of them can say. To most of the voices on the Sunday morning talk shows and the nation's top op-ed pages, and to the former Secretary of Whatevers hired by the networks to offer "expert opinions" on everything from military strategy in the desert to ob/gyn tactics for septuplets, President Clinton is not the current president of the United States, but Neville Chamberlain reincarnate. The punditocracy shares a nearly universal belief that when Clinton and Hussein stood "eyeball-to-eyeball," Clinton blinked. There is a word for Clinton's response to Iraq's machinations last week, thundered Charles Krauthammer: "Appeasement -- lacking, of course, the scale of the ignominy at Munich, but matching nicely the style." New York Times columnist A.M. Rosenthal also found the Chamberlain sellout analogy to his liking, writing that the controversy was resolved "in the sense that the 'controversy' caused by Hitler's appetite for Czechoslovakia was 'resolved' at Munich in 1938." His colleague William Safire added, "In a meeting reminiscent of Molotov and von Ribbentrop, Primakov and Tariq Aziz agreed to 'more effective' inspection." "As president of the United States," former Newt Gingrich mouthpiece Tony Blankley harrumphed on CNN's "Late Edition," Clinton "didn't feel he was potentially powerful enough to exercise" American power. Al Hunt told CNN "Capital Gang" viewers that Hussein is now "better off." This view was echoed by Steve Roberts on "Late Edition," by Wall Street Journal columnist Paul Gigot on Jim Lehrer's "Newshour" and John McLaughlin on his show, "Clowntime," aka "The McLaughlin Group." The punditocracy had wanted war, and they were pissed when Clinton took it away from them. N E X T+P A G E+| Let's form a posse!