Say this for U.S. President George W. Bush: He might have wrong-footed the question of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, but he struck just the right note when asked to comment on the flap over singer Janet Jackson's risque performance in the Super Bowl halftime show in Houston the night before. Mr. Bush said he fell asleep and missed it. "This White House starts early," he told reporters. "Saw the first half [of the game], did not see the half time. . . . But you all can tell me about it," he joked.

American reporters and commentators have been telling him, and anyone else who would listen, about little else this past week. The incident very nearly pushed Tuesday's Democratic presidential primaries and the discovery of ricin in the U.S. Senate out of the headlines. As for such minor concerns as Iraq, Iran, the Middle East and bird flu, they have been way down the playbill.

In case you, too, slept through America's controversy du jour and remained comatose throughout the aftermath, here's what happened: During a raunchy song-and-dance Super Bowl duet with Justin Timberlake, Ms. Jackson suffered what Mr. Timberlake later memorably described as a "wardrobe malfunction," leading to the exposure of one of her breasts before a prime-time television audience of 89 million.