Her meltdowns on “Saturday Night Live” and during the Orange Bowl halftime are already the stuff giving the cruel especial delight, the cynical confirmation, and the circumspect little but reason sadly to shake their heads. Nearly everyone wonders, in some form or another, why or how this unprepared young woman was thrust into the public spotlight, and why the music industry is so insistent she’s a star. But most of us thought it was because of her older sister ? just as the same folks are tapping the well of the still-ostensibly-virginal Jamie Lynn Spears, to see if she has the star power of her older sister.

But The Boston Globe offers a deeper, more troubling explanation for the Ashlee debacle: her father. Seems Joe Simpson speaks of his own daughters rather like a hormonally crazed teenage boy, and not as a father:

In a GQ interview last month, Joe said, ”Jessica never tries to be sexy. She just is sexy. If you put her in a T-shirt or you put her in a bustier, she’s sexy in both. She’s got double D’s! You can’t cover those suckers up!”