See Cruise Implode

Mr. Irresponsible hates to wax his own car, but Thursday's Tom Cruise/Matt Lauer slapfight provides a neat illustration of the kind of overreaching I warned against in my post about "Fitting The Black Hat."  (Video is here. Skip ahead to about the eight-minute mark to get to the good stuff.) Cruise made a critical miscalculation in picking Lauer as his Punch-Me Clown; people tend to like Lauer, or at least they think they do, in the way people tend to think they know something about the true natures of the celebrities they see on TV. They like his easygoing nature and the menschy way he didn't try to hide the encroachment of his male-pattern baldness. They like the big-brothery kick he seems to get out of co-anchor Katie Couric, even as she sinks and sinks into the death grip of that gooey fake empathy that's now de rigeur on the morning shows. In choosing Lauer to scold for his "ignorance" and "glibness," Cruise made amateur mistake number one, as enumerated here just two days ago: He failed to fit the black hat on somebody who is less appealing than he is. That "whoosh" you heard was all the remaining air going out of Cruise's rapidly deflating regular-guy reputation. Sparring peevishly with the amiable Lauer, who wisely refused to take the bait, it was Cruise who came off looking silly, uninformed and mean. Tom. Tom. Didn't I try to tell you?