A JAB, A LEFT HOOK AND OUT FOR THE COUNT.

Byline: Dennis McCarthy 

I was invited to some intellectual dialogue over dinner with Arianna Huffington the other night.

The doctors say I should be up and around in a few weeks.

Now I know how all those patsies who stepped into the ring with Rocky Marciano and Joe Louis felt. I swear, I never saw the punch coming.

Arianna took me out faster than Ali took out Liston in their second fight. I don't think the salad had even been served yet.

Forget about it. Pound for pound, nobody in the country has a better verbal jab and left hook than Arianna Huffington. Nobody - man or woman.

She levels that ``How can you be so stupid, darling?'' look at you, and before you know it two guys are carrying you out on a stretcher.

``Did I score any points?'' you're asking your friends later when you wake up.

``Nope, you never laid a glove on her,'' they say. ``KO, Round 1.''

I used to hate the woman. Now I'm only scared of her. She makes too much sense.

Let me give you a little background. About a month ago, I received an invitation from publicist Michael Levine to join Huffington and a handful of selected media types for dinner and some intellectual dialogue.

I get invited to a lot of dinners, but never any that involve intellectual dialogue. My hosts usually have read my column. They are well aware of my limitations.

I called Levine's office, figuring he had the wrong McCarthy. His secretary double-checked. Nope, she said. I was the McCarthy they wanted. Obviously, Levine doesn't read the column.

It turns out he started this thing called the Los Angeles Media Roundtable awhile back - a monthly dinner at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel to encourage intellectual dialogue in L.A.

In his words, ``to foster, encourage and provoke intelligent dialogue by bringing together a broad spectrum of bright, interesting, thoughtful and passionate Los Angelenos.''

In reality, it turned out to be a rerun of just about every Woody Allen movie you've ever seen.

A bunch of pretentious liberals, boring conservatives and ``I can't make my mind up'' independents sipping expensive wine and dining on watercress salad and filet mignon while trying to figure out why the poor can't be more like us.

You know, hold down a nice job, have a mortgage, two cars, kids in college - the whole nine yards that makes so many of our lives so wonderfully interesting and challenging.

Hopefully, by the time the wine runs out and the waiters gather up our dirty dishes, we've come up with a few answers. Then we can enjoy coffee and dessert, talking about something we really want to have a dialogue about - how well we're all doing these days.

The concept of the round table is commendable, but I've got to figure that if you really want to get down and dirty on what we can do to help turn around this two-tier society of haves and have-nots we're rapidly becoming, this intellectual dialogue should have been going on down at an inner-city Taco Bell or KFC, not the Regent Beverly Wilshire.

Maybe we could have actually gotten some of the people we were talking about to move their $2.99 specials over to our table and enlighten us a little on what was really going on and how things could change. Instead, we were getting our cars valet-parked in Beverly Hills.

Why lie? I didn't go to the dinner with any expectations of solving any of society's ills anyway. I went to check out Arianna Huffington.

I've been watching her on the TV political talk shows and reading her column for a while now. The woman captivates me.

I don't know whether it's her voice or her mind. There's just something about her. She's not particularly beautiful, but she has these bedroom eyes.

They were staring up at me from the dinner table. Levine had put a copy of her book, ``Greetings From the Lincoln Bedroom,'' on every seat.

After the dinner broke up, she offered to sign everyone's book. Normally, I pass on the personal autographs because then I feel some obligation to actually read the book, instead of putting it straight into the Goodwill box.

But those bedroom eyes of Arianna's drew me to her seat at the head of the table.

``You had some very interesting things to say tonight,'' she said in that sexy voice, taking the book from my hand and looking up at me.

``But . . .'' she added.

I swear, I never saw the punch coming.