It's pretty much a straight-up "quid pro quo": We swipe funny stuff from Harry Shearer, we give him a book plug. Isn't that how it's suppposed to go?

We jumped on the story of News Corp.'s O.J. book-and-TV project, but we've been less gung-ho about the aftermath--notably the firing on Friday, supposedly ordered by News Corp. boss of bosses Rupert Murdoch himself, of project guru Judith Regan from her post as publisher of her ReganBooks imprint. (Isn't that a great scene: the security guards ushering Ms. R out of the office of her own imprint? Or at any rate what she had foolishly come to think of as "her own" imprint, simply because it bore her name. I assume Mr. Murdoch owns that now.)

As I was saying, we've steered clear of this aftermath, because of the strong sense that it no longer has much to do with the O.J. project but is the playing out of seismic factors within the News Corp. empire, presumably centered around the invariably cited animosity between Ms. R and her food-chain superior, HarperCollins Books head honcho Jane Friedman.

And now we see, from what I read in that gossip rag the New York Times, that the allegedly "anti-Semitic" remarks that supposedly triggered her firing were in fact accusations she made of a cabal against her consisting of people who are (a) Jewish and (b) gunning for her. These accusations were apparently promptly pumped into Mr. Murdoch's ear by those people who are (a) Jewish and (b) gunning for her.

Of course I can't speak for the entire World Jewish Conspiracy, but it strikes me that as charges of anti-Semitism go, this one is just plain pathetic.

There is, however, fun to be extracted from Ms. Regan's misery on HuffingtonPost, where Harry Shearer, with a "comic novel" to sell, Not Enough Indians, which he swears "stubbornly remains available, and, yes, it does make a splendid Christmas-Chanukkah-Kwanzaa gift" (and hey, if we can't trust the author on this, whom can we trust?), reports on a phone interview he did with our Judith for her Sirius Radio show.

("My motive was clear, if not clouded by doubt about hanging telephonically with the woman who was this close to publishing the O.J. 'hypothetical' murder memoir: when you're trying to sell a book, you'll talk to anybody willing to promote it. . . . Good Morning America rejected me, for example, as 'too highbrow'--apparently somebody had leaked word about my secret consulting with Stephen Hawking.")

The first ten minutes or so go great, in Harry's estimation, "although . . . every few minutes, some little wisp of steam escapes that warns of the eruption to come, some little comment about 'They're always gunning for successful women in this country'--which has nothing to do with anything we've been talking about." But eventually, sure enough, "Mt. Judith erupts." Eventually that leads to this truly bizarre exchange:

She kept on the subject of the drive against successful women, until I finally pointed out that nobody seems to be gunning for Oprah. "Not yet," she replied. Frankly, she seemed so at sea for an answer to the question of the shitstorm that had rained down on her, I finally offered one: "I think one reason people may have reacted so angrily and energetically against this project was because it was an opportunity to attack Rupert Murdoch."

"Why would they want to do that?" she asked. She really did.

I decided to be comedically blunt: "Because he's evil."

That really set her off. "You take his money. You're like all the Hollywood hypocrites, you criticize him but you're happy to take his money."

"Judith," I said, trying to get her back into a mood which might allow for mentioning my book again, "a good friend once told me that the only way to really hurt Rupert Murdoch is to take as much of his money as humanly possible."

"That's demented," she replied.

"I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a saint in the media-mogul business these days," I finished up.

Now if that doesn't earn a book plug, I don't know what does. I haven't bought the book, or read it, but I have it on excellent authority that it makes a splendid gift.