Maybe, He Should Have Let Odie Draw a Few Strips While He Was Away, on Vacation

Gene Weingarten, a humor columnist for The Washington Post and Washington Post Writers Group, praised the Times decision during his weekly washingtonpost.com chat yesterday. He said the paper displayed "the kind of cojones missing in too many places" and described "Garfield" as "a strip produced by a committee, devoid of originality, devoid of guts, a strip cynically DESIGNED to be inoffensive and bad, on the theory that public tastes are insipid.

When the public stops reading The Family Circus, I'll join in the outrage, but until someone silences Bil Keane's pen, I'm going to have to side with the Public-tastes-are-insipid crowd, and go about my day, shaking my head in disgust as I go.