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It doesn't take a Jeff Zucker-level wunderkind morning show producer to know that the mathematical equation of Today host + celebrity cult flack = good television. Today on Today's "Mysterious Faiths" series came Round Two with The Church of Scientology (or as their representative Michael Rinder pronounces it, "The Chooch of Scientology"). Rinder, level-headed as a milkmaid, was clearly sent to suck some of the crazy-stink off the Scientology brand still lingering from the Tom Cruise-Matt Lauer interview debacle of last summer. But opposite peppy piranha Katie Couric, Rinder can only muster FEMA-calibre levels of damage control:

Katie: [L. Ron Hubbard] wrote that 75 million years ago, an evil galactic ruler named Xenu killed billions of his people by sending them to earth in space-planes. You can understand why some people might find this at best off-putting. And I guess at worse, just plain out there.


Rinder: (chuckles) I can understand that, certainly, Katie. That just has no basis in reality. This is one of those things that gets spread around. One of those stories that gets run around.

Katie: So he never wrote about that?

Rinder: No. Not in those terms. (pause) There is an alteration and twisting of things...

We're glad the record has been set straight on this outlandish "Xenu" business once and for all; if Katie had done her legwork, she would have known that it was the hydrogen bombs that Xenu dropped into the volcanoes where the space-planes landed that killed them.