Kathleen Parker shot to journalistic stardom and a regular slot on the Washington Post’s op-ed page last year by a successful campaign of self-advertisement as a comely conservative female who was nevertheless prepared to adopt the liberal media’s line on Sarah Palin as an overpromoted airhead who owed everything to her looks and incongruous handiness with a moose-rifle. Yet suddenly Miss Parker found herself all a-flutter and reduced to what she represents as the hero-worshiping condition of Katharine Hepburn’s Rose Sayer in The African Queen during a much publicized bout of newsroom fisticuffs between the Post’s Henry Allen and Manuel Roig-Franzia. Actually, it was one punch that may or may not have been more of a slap by Mr. Allen in response to having been called, in what may or may not have been a light-hearted manner, an obscene name by Mr. Roig-Franzia. The suddenly “weak-kneed” Miss Parker wrote:

Maybe, as with all things lately, we’re overanalyzing what amounted to a scuffle between two men under the influence of testosterone. Alex Jones, longtime media critic and head of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, distilled the event to its plainer truth: “Maybe it’s because I’m from the South, but if you call me a ‘[bleep],’ I’m going to take a shot at you unless I know I’ll get the crap kicked out of me … and maybe even then.” Which is to say that Allen was defending his honor, an act