In a piece on The Daily Beast today, Tina Brown finally gets hip to Anna Wintour's Make-People-Like-Me Tour 2009, but she does it all wrong. Her Anna has mastered the time-space continuum.

Just a few months ago, Vogue editor Anna Wintour was fighting negative press and rumors of a replacement. Then she came up with a plan...She allowed the documentary director R.J. Cutler's movie cameras behind the closed doors of Vogue's offices in Times Square...Now [The September Issue] movie is a hit. Anna is bigger than ever.

So, if she came up with a plan three months ago, she must have then gone back into the past to September of 2007, told past Anna to make the documentary happen so that future Anna could save her job. Did she have a flux capacitor installed in her town car? Yes, we agree that Anna has orchestrated this whole thing—movie release, Letterman appearance, Fashion's Night Out—but this strike has been years in the making. Anna is nothing if not shrewd.

Tina's theory is that this isn't a Make-People-Like-Me Tour at all, but that she's trying to play up her caricatured bitchiness.

After so much reality TV and confessional celebrity interviews, the public is tired of accessible stars. Who needs them to be Just Like Us? Just Like Us means just as boring as we are. It's mystique today that everybody craves. What's she really like behind the dark glasses? Anna's appeal is that she has no interest in pretending to be human.

Ouch. And this is a very public swipe, considering the long simmering rivalry between the two that goes back a generation, when Wintour's father, the editor of London's Daily Standard would run bad reviews of the movie's produced by Brown's father. Now Brown is using her digital instrument to serve Wintour backhanded compliments.

But as one ex-high-powered magazine editor to a current high-powered magazine editor, Brown does have some sympathy.

But maybe Anna isn't a bitch, just a smart, hard-headed businesswoman doing her job...I guess you get called a bitch when you get things done.

Sounds like something Tina might know from experience.