IMPORTED BEEF Musharraf, Bhutto (Photo: Getty Images)
Conventional wisdom maintains that the person, place, or thing left standing at the end of a fight is the winner. In Beef of the Week, Radar unravels the most prominent spat of the last seven days, deconstructing its causes and effects, and issuing a final verdict on the battle's victor. Let the games begin.

Our week started with Benazir "The Karachi Kid" Bhutto—a former Pakistan prime minister recently returned from self-imposed exile—a day into her second state-ordered lockdown and Pakistan honcho Pervez "Islamabadass" Musharraf balls deep in martial law. See-through states of emergency, you'll remember, are generally bad: Those who lead them are usually abused in unread history books. But for the sake of Beef of the Week, let's call the front-page battle between these two a tie until now—The Karachi Kid with her international corruption-y past and immobility, Islamabadass his dictatorial slant and dry-erase constitution.

The Karachi Kid's isolation was a perfect working staycation—fielding international phone calls, drinking gallons of Gatorade, avoiding suicidal loons. Pervez, though, was left punching himself in the face in the middle of the ring, ultimately coup d'etat-ing his own coup d'etat in a series of missteps that sacked a potentially difficult Supreme Court. In the long term, maybe Bhutto didn't really mind, left as she was to lob rhetorical meatballs like coalition, freedom, and democracy while the battle-weary lame-duck warded off head shots from the country's militant wings, body blows from KK's populists, and nut checks from moderator Don King—here known as the U.S.

And Don King? Till now he's been unable to nibble his samosa in peace, seeming to care more that the beefy matters of the nuclear-pumped nation merely end rather than who's left standing.

Pervez on Bhutto: "[She] tries to take all the advantages of a conciliatory mode, and try to take all the advantages of a confrontationist mode. And what kind of attitude is this? I'm afraid this is, what do you think, negative vibes..." Negative vibes?! Oh, he's good. Those vibes, they are in fact negative.

Today, Bhutto's free ("The house is no longer a sub-jail but security will remain for her own protection," said one official) and she's leaped over the ropes and has the crowd on their feet. Other oppositional forces are circling around her, and it shows in her language. The Beef is now laced with far more Fuck This-type burns than previously. Islamabadass's weak, but it's still not over. Elections are left to come (which KK rejects, monitored as they will be by a new interim cabinet selected by Islamabadass himself), and Pakistan's still-in-charge chief has some serious face to save.

Musharraf had this to say last week: "Life continues, no body is permanent. One comes, one serves, tries one's best in the interest of the nation ... and then when they have to go, that is the way of nature. They have to leave, and this is what is democracy." It must be even tastier for The Karachi Kid to hear those words today.

Victory goes to Benazir Bhutto.