Maury & Connie & O'Reilly

Good for Maury Povich and Connie Chung, doing their Tracy-Hepburn act on MSNBC.

Maury and Connie are two of the coolest people in the business, real straightforward, and very fun on television. They are the tops.

Both attended the Tabloid Baby book party at Elaine's in 1999 (Connie, despite a leg injury), and for that we will always be grateful.

And Maury, of course, wrote the ultimate Tabloid Baby book blurb:

"Burt was there for the birthing of tabloid, he became the heart of the genre, and now he's written the Bible!"

So remember, Weekends With Maury and Connie starts on MSNBC on Saturday. It will be lively and you'll get to see two top pros at work and play.

And we dug their Q&A with New York magazine:

What was the biggest story of your journalistic career?
Connie: Watergate.
Maury: I anchored A Current Affair from Berlin when the wall came down. We covered the East Germans in the red-light district [of West Germany] to find out if they knew what Western democracy was all about.

(We were there in Berlin with Maury, witnessing and making history. Read the amazing story of A Current Affair & the fall of the Berlin Wall. It's quite an adventure. And it's all true. Honest.)

Let’s play the word-association game… Geraldo.

C: The worst! 

M: He never should have quit my game.

Bill O’Reilly.
C: Is there a category for even worse?
M: A previous competitor.

Anderson Cooper.
C: Hot! But I’m not his type. I can’t fit the bill.
M: So gray, so young.

How about . . . tabloid TV.
C: Tacky.
M: My savior.

Geraldo, we know about. O'Reilly? We'll get to that phony in good time.

It was very funny to watch him on Letterman last night, and see how Letterman was more passionate, informed and commonsensical than the multimillionaire Spinmeister, playing lower-middle class in his Catholic Decency League suit and tie.

When Letterman said, "Honest to Christ"-- twice, attempting to cut through the rhetoric and get real, star-to-star-- we saw the wall come down.

When O'Reilly got indignant and called Letterman "sir," as if he were in some 1950s witch hunt hearings, we had to wonder how anyone takes this bully seriously at all.

But we'll get to him later...