Hayden Panettiere is best known for playing that indestructible cheerleader on Heroes, but it looks like her real super-power is the ability to make the English language mean whatever the hell she wants. Recently she felt the need to stick up for her friend Paris Hilton (seen above, with Hayden on the right), who she called “a nice girl” and “a marketing genius.”

Now, it would be easy to point out that anyone who thinks Paris is a genius would probably need remedial tutoring to qualify as a potted plant, but we’re not going to go there. Or, we could mention a few of the occasions when Paris has said or done things that were distinctly un-bright, but since Googling on “Paris Hilton stupid” brings up more than half a million links, that seems a little too easy. I prefer to think that Hayden is just a really, really nice person. She defended dolphins in Japan, and now she’s defending a woman widely regarded as completely indefensible. Hayden is probably just a few years away from founding an animal shelter specifically for bad-tempered, wonky-eyed weasels with STDs, because if she doesn’t protect them, no one else will.