Perhaps We Could Get Michael Jackson Interested in Tom Cruise and Get Rid of Two Strange Birds with One Event

If only the Downing Street Memo got a tenth - hell, a hundredth - of the attention being paid to a) the Michael Jackson trial and Michael's fondness for spending days every week in the hospital and then bringing the hospital staff in tow to court with him and b) Tom Cruise's desperate attempts to prove he's heterosexual by dating Hollywood's self proclaimed only virgin who's half Cruise's age.

Here are two men so deeply mired in their own egos, their own psychopathology, and yet they're also two of the richest men in this country while contributing very little to the society.

Michael's just pathetic: a man child who is clearly still stuck in his childhood and hiding behind some pretention that it's beautiful to sleep with a child. I have no idea whether the charges against him are true or not but the facts of the whole case as presented and the lengths to which Orange County is going with it (months for a trial like this?) leave the matter ripe with speculation that it's a vendetta. How about trying the parents who allow their kids to go there on sleepovers? At what point is the problem star-crazed parents who see dollar signs with Jackson? Prostituting your children is, I believe, a punishable offense.

And Tom? Almost as pathetic. Somewhere along the line, Tom decided he was Mr. Charisma, Mr. Consummate Actor, Mr. Macho. Remember his role as the weird self-help guru in Magnolia? Well, that's Tom's version of reality. Is it really going to hurt his career that badly if he finally acknowledges he's a gay man? Because it doesn't matter to many, I don't think.

Last week, I heard that Cruise had gone on the offensive against anyone who takes prescription drugs. They're a crutch, he insists; it's against his religion and he wants it against everyone else's too. He attacked another nearly talentless actor, Brooke Shields, who said she had gotten help from antidepressants.

Wow, I want a Scientologist preaching to me as much as I want a nutso fundamentalist. Tom has little knowledge of medicine and probably isn't wildly bright in most other areas either.

But if Tom wants to crusade, perhaps he could choose to crusade against people who are so obsessed with lying to themselves that they have to push out in front of cameras so others can validate the lie.

Just please, please, please, media: spare us more Tommy and Michael. There are so many more important issues and these little boys are so unimportant.