Talk show strategy.

Did you see P.J. O'Rourke, Cornel West, and Julie Delpy panelling together last night on "Real Time With Bill Maher"? There was a lot of inane yammering, especially by Delpy ("My English is not so good"), and, rather than compete for air time, O'Rourke pursued a finely executed minimalist strategy. Take a look at the rerun, and check out his tiny one-liners. O'Rourke got a lot of mileage out of deadpanning the kind of outlandish opinions that everyone else on the panel blithely attributes to conservatives. I especially liked when he had West for a half-second, after a West rant about drug companies that ended with asking whether you would prefer drug companies that looked for more remedies for sexual impotence or a vaccine for AIDS, and O'Rourke said, "It depends on if I had AIDS."