Reviews in the trade magazine Publishers Weekly are always funny things -- a cross between a prediction of the book's commercial performance and a more "objective" estimation of the book's real quality (for reasons which should be obvious, pans of major releases are rare, but they do occur).

This review of conservative writer Stephen F. Hayes's book The Connection is one of the strangest I've yet seen. After outlining what it describes as a pretty weak attempt to bolster the fraying party line on the question of Iraq as a player in the World Trade Center attacks, it goes on to conclude that "most readers" will decide that the connection "still has play."

I can't decide what's stranger -- the choice of the reviewer to throw in his lot with the neocons in this venue, or the logic by which the conclusion is reached.