Polanski, Phillips, and Peda...ntry.

If this week has taught me anything, it's that nothing precludes us from robbing banks right now.  Seriously.  The economy sucks.  Most of my friends have nothing resembling decent health coverage (but rest assured, Obama is doing all he can to make sure Chicago secures the 2012 Olympic Games.) 

Meanwhile, newly-minted CNN correspondent Joy Behar is helping the nation make sense of the deaths of Patrick Swayze and Ted Kennedy with such pearls of wisdom as “all the good people are dying!”  This is on top of the fact that her first interview is with Bette Midler, aka Behar's freakishly identical doppelganger.

The whole thing is upsetting, particularly because I was saving the phrase "newly-minted CNN correspondent Joy Behar" for a story I was writing about the Apocalypse.

Of course, maybe it already is the Apocolypse and I'm just not aware.  This would explain the fact that the day William Safire died was the same day I heard the verb "de-planing" for the first time.  Is a 24-hour moratorium on offensively useless verbs so much to ask?

William Safire taught us that George Bush should be hated not for his crimes against humanity, but for the crime against grammar that is the phrase "visit with."  But I guess this means nothing to JetBlue who, in addition to taking creative liberties with the concept of "leaving," committed the equally heinous crime of making The Proposal their in-flight movie.

Now, with the Polanski/Phillips revalations of the week, we discover that the standards for lionization have lowered yet again.  Like, to the earth's molten core.  And here I was naively thinking that you actually had to be dead and a good person.  Apparently, you can be neither.

Let's take a minute to contrast the news coverage of Mackenzie Phillips with that of Roman Polanski.  Not that the newspaper headline "Mackenzie Philips Says She Had Sex with Dad!" is anything resembling poor taste.

While Phillips' story is this month's Problem with no Name, I've found that there's no shortage of frothing-at-the-mouth Polanski-ites.  My favorite is the Washington Post's Anne Appelbaum, who was so embittered about always being called on first in school that she has chosen to take it out on people who read.

Using the logical power of her friends the gender-gap activists, Appelbaum asserts that

"Polanski has paid for his crime in many ways. In notoriety, in lawyer's fees, in professional stigma.  He could not return to Los Angeles to receive his recent Oscar. He cannot visit Hollywood."

Maybe it's just me, but I don't think that missing the opportunity to be sideswiped with Lindsay Lohan's car is quite proportional to raping a 13-year-old.

Appelbaum ends with her own Behar-esque pearl of wisdom: "If he weren't famous, I bet nobody would bother [Polanski] at all!"

Yeah. And "I Saw her Again Last Night" was written about a puppy.

I'm not saying that Polanski is completely undeserving of sympathy.  I mean, you'd have to be robot not to pity a child rapist whose solidarity petition was signed by Woody Allen.  Considering that Woody Allen endorsing Roman Polanski is about as helpful as Britney Spears endorsing someone's 'non-crazy,' I am forced to conclude that Woody Allen actually hates Roman Polanski and is being shrewd about it.

For the record, Woody Allen signed a petition expressing "stupefaction" with Polanski's arrest.  I am equally stupifac-tied that the Times related this fact sans certain, er, relevant information.  I think it would be perfectly within AP standards to follow "Woody Allen" with the phrase "noted filmmaker and Step-Freak Extraordinaire...."

Michelle Philips was the star of One Day at a Time.  Roman Polanski, on the other hand, directed Chinatown, one of the greatest films of all time.  Which basically means that he's perfect.  Though I can't help but be reminded of a quote from the Simpsons: "Nobody who speaks German could be an evil man!"

So if there's a moral here, it's that while America casts a net of forgiveness around its celebrities, this net doesn't include anyone whose filmography includes a guest-stint on Caroline in the City.

Like Hollywood's desperate undermining of Polanski's victim, the nation continues to hope that Phillips is just a case of TV sibling rivalry gone terribly wrong.  No one can dispute that Mackenzie Philips' Oprah Moment trumped Valerie Bertinelli's (where she revealed that she cheated on husband Eddie Van Halen) by about a million miles.

In the meantime, Oprah is the undisputed queen of domestic shock and awe.  Hence her tag line: "If it didn't happen on the Oprah Show, shit didn't go down."

As for the rest of you, I wish you a joy Behar-filled rest of your week.  Or to use her own wise words,
"My mothah always said, 'When it's your time to go, ya go!'"
It all seems so simple when she says it.  Now if you don't mind, I'm going to listen to Joy pontificate on how Charles Manson is "healthy as a hawwse!"


I'm definitely seeing horses.  Four of them.


****Update:  great article in Salon from fellow Appelbaum victim Kate Harding.