MR. HENNINGER: Winners and losers, picks and pans, Tony or Tacky. Our way of calling attention to the best and worst of the week.
John Fund returns to that tense Senate negotiation about the filibuster. It turns out that Senator John McCain set the deadline for the deal and it was all about getting to a certain movie premiere on time. John, tony or tacky?
JOHN FUND: A tad tacky, Dan. When John McCain showed up at the press conference announcing the filibuster deal his cell phone rang and he had to go to the premiere of a new film based on his Vietnam War heroism FAITH OF MY FATHERS which airs on Memorial Day. And, ever since then, Oren Hatch and other Republican senators have been ribbing him mercilessly because he actually mentioned the film twice during the press conference announcing the filibuster deal.
So tacky a little because we have taken the line between politics, Hollywood and heroism and blurred it completely now.
MR. HENNINGER: I would say so. Full length movies about the lives of U.S. senators is an amazing concept.
On a somewhat loftier note, Jason Riley has been looking at the Best Sellers Lists, and trying to decide what they say about our reading standards. Jason, tony or tacky?
JASON RILEY: Well this is tony for America's reading preferences or at least some of them. The current Best Seller List boasts titles by Goldie Hawn, Brooke Shields and Jane Fonda. I think it's understandable that this sort of celebrity worship makes people uncomfortable or if a lot of people are upset. But I think there's another way of looking at it and that is at some of the other books on the current Best Seller List which are about globalization, economics, even how the brain makes snap decisions. So, even though there are a lot of people out there who are very concerned about how many people Jane Fonda slept with simultaneously, there are also a lot of people out there interested in what the new global marketplace will do for the job situation in the U.S. and I think we call all take some comfort in that.
MR. HENNINGER: So good reading makes a comeback. One would like to think so. Finally, fasten your seatbelts, Paris Hilton, whose talent as a self-promoter and marketing genius we have praised in the past, is at the center of a controversy over whether her pitch for hamburgers should be broadcast only after the kids are asleep. Kim, let me guess.
KIM STRASSEL: Yeah, this is a tacky for the simple fact that this commercial is going to throw us into another one of these endless painful debates about what's appropriate for network television, comparisons to Janet Jackson and the Super Bowl and all of that. Already the Parents Television Council is working on a petition to have the FCC look at this. So we're going to have Paris on the mind for a long time to come.
But the other thing is, this is just a tacky commercial. It's aimed at teenaged kids and you can see how that might work. But fundamentally Carl's Jr. which did the commercial is a family restaurant and to the extent that mommies who are the parents of these kids are going to be wondering if they really want Tommy and Jimmy to be thinking about Paris Hilton every time he eats a hamburger. You have to wonder if they are still going to be going there to eat.
MR. HENNINGER: Well, I wanted the commercial and Paris never actually bites into the hamburger. I suppose that would be a little too gross. That's it for this edition of THE JOURNAL EDITORIAL REPORT. Thank you from all of us. We'll be back next week with Paul Gigot and we hope you'll join us then.
