From: nebusj-@-rpi-.edu   
      
   	So, now, the feud with Newark: what do you think, folks?   
      
   	I kind of have the feeling that it was a fun notion but built   
   up into something a bit bigger and longer-run than the incident really   
   justified.  It's fun when a mayor of an insulted city takes umbrage and   
   fights back, but this sort of thing is also kind of the imitation of a   
   controversy, without the risk of anyone really coming out looking worse   
   for the experience.   
      
   	After all, while it's dangerous to argue with critics, Booker   
   could not come out looking bad for complaining about a cheap joke sent   
   Newark's way: his constituents, to the extent they cared, would take a   
   natural bit of pride at being stuck up for.  (And it doesn't hurt that   
   New Jersey is, in the words of a comical atlas which was released at the   
   same time as The Onion's Our Dumb World, and which I failed to pick up   
   at the time and probably will never see again, the most self-defensive   
   state in the Union.)  It plays well for him.  And it plays well for   
   Conan, too, in that he gets to have one joke spun out and repeated and   
   talked about and to feed into other natural laugh lines, such as the   
   'horror' of being banned from Newark Airport.  Hear the idea and you   
   have a smile already.   
      
   	(The real menace in being banned from Newark, by the way, would   
   not be having to go through JFK; it would be having to go through   
   La Guardia.)   
      
   	And then in the resolution and the shaking of hands and smiling   
   everybody comes off looking good.  (OK, better than good; I hadn't   
   considered that Booker had any particular charities, and a donation   
   like that helps everybody look better.)  It's happy all around, but it   
   did mean that even with the 'escalation' of things there wasn't the   
   sense that actual blood might be drawn.  Now, that's fine; but, it did   
   mean that as long as the events weren't getting more ridiculous, such   
   as the 'toilet seat of communities' Conan declared to be with him, that   
   it was just padding to try to suggest the feud meant anything.  The   
   stretch between Clinton's 'intervention' and Booker's appearance was   
   anticlimax, and hyping it just brought to the center the drifting   
   nature of that stretch.   
      
   	Overall, I think it started out pretty fun, but got a bit too   
   much play when its story had played out and that chipped away the fun.   
      
   --   
   								Joseph Nebus   
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)