Pat Dollard, Hollywood Guy Gone Gonzo

"Isn't somebody going to notice he's insane?" Wright wondered as he watched Dollard bantering with Sean Hannity. Apparently not. "In the pro-wrestling world of opinion TV," Wright notes, "Dollard is a natural."

In the last scene of the story, Dollard is being feted by conservatives at a Hollywood party, babbling about how the liberal media is "literally allied with the Islamic Fascist Imperialists." Meanwhile, Coulter is pigging out on guacamole and chips and questioning the manhood of conservatives who are insufficiently pro-war.

"A male guest approaches, slips Coulter his number, and delivers what must be the ultimate pickup line at a conservative party. 'I'm having dinner tomorrow night with Richard Perle. Would you like to join us?' ''

This deliciously demented tale deserves a place in the vast history of Hollywood weirdness -- and also in the history of the ongoing, spectacular flameout of neoconservatism.

Good's Best

Good is a good magazine that likes to salute good things. In its third issue, the L.A.-based bimonthly has a piece called "The 51 Best Magazines Ever." It's one of those lists that are fun to argue about, and magazine lovers will enjoy arguing about it.

Personally I have no problem with the choice for No. 1 -- Esquire in its heyday in the 1960s, when it published Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese and other writers who were inventing what came to be called the "new journalism." And I won't beef about the next few choices -- the New Yorker, Life, Playboy, New York Times Magazine and Mad (in that order).

But I started grumbling as I moved down the list. Should Wired (No. 8) and Andy Warhol's Interview (9) really be rated higher than Rolling Stone (11) , National Geographic (12) and the Saturday Evening Post (26)? Why did the Atlantic Monthly (15) make the cut and not Harper's?

I'm glad the list includes Ramparts (18), the feisty, outrageous and visually zippy radical mag from the '60s. But where is McClure's, the feisty, influential, muckraking magazine from the turn of the 20th century? And how did the cheeseball shopping mag Lucky (44) find a place in this august company?

The editors of Good made these selections and then they had the good sense to get Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair (31) and co-founder of Spy (7), to write the introduction. Carter reminds the magazine world of an important but oft-forgotten truth:

"For a publication to succeed it has to have a point," he writes. "It can't just come into being because the owner wants to impress his friends. Or because market studies have shown an opening in a certain line of interest. Many of the big magazine companies, such as Time Inc., are run these days not by people who love magazines but by people in search of profit. Great magazines come from the gut and the heart."

Amen.