James Wolcott takes a club to nearly everyone who's come across his TV screen in the last 48 hours:

· On Margaret Carlson and Robert Novak: ...Carlson (how the hell does she have a career?) had been so effusive in praise of them and so abusive in disparagement of Michael Schiavo that Robert Novak commended her after she paused for breath, which is like being kissed by a vampire who's removed his fangs. Of course, it's easy for your heart to go out to people when it's untethered from your brain, and Carlson's brain has never been a wonder of science.

· On Nancy Grace and Don Imus: Just this morning the appalling Nancy Grace railed on Imus's MSNBC show that Terri Schiavo was "turning and twisting in pain" and nobody was doing anything about it. I have no heard a single medical expert or visitor to her room claim that she's showing any signs of physical anguish. That was something Nancy Grace just pulled out of imaginative ass and Don Imus, who can rampage for days on the finest details of the "vicious hatchetjob" the Wall Street Journal did on him, was too dumbfuck even to call her on it.

But most interestingly, Wolcott details a punch he pulled with regard to Joe Scarborough—one involving a dead woman in Scarborough's former district office:

And then there's Joe Scarborough. Because I have a heart, I removed a couple of pages from by book Attack Poodles about the death of Lori Klausitis, a young staffer for then Republican Congressman Scarborough whose body was discovered in his district office. He was in Washington, DC at the time of her death, but there were some iffy aspects about her case and unlike the Gary Condit situation, this mini-mystery got no play in the national media since it didn't plug into the horny Clinton Democrats-interns meme...I felt I could make my points about him as a TV personality without the passage, so I cut it, and hearing second-hand he was concerned about the book, called him up to tell him so. We had a very pleasant, brief conversation, and that was it.

Or maybe he cut it because if it isn't true, what he's implying could result in a Condit-esque lawsuit, like the one his VF colleague Dominick Dunne is fighting (and possibly losing) at the moment. (UPDATE: Settled a couple of weeks ago, we're told. But still.)