Hugh Hewitt has a quick post about Mary Mapes’s appearance on Howard Kurtz’s show. Hewitt writes:

Howard Kurtz also said he still isn’t taking a position on whether “these documents are real or fake.” That’s extraordinary.

I didn’t see the exchange, but if Kurtz really is insisting that he’s agnostic then that truly is extraordinary–because Kurtz and his Post colleague Michael Dobbs wrote one of the most damning pieces ever written about the documents. Go back and read that September 14, 2004 piece and you’ll see that Kurtz and Dobbs:

* Demolished the Bill Glennon testimony CBS had trotted out a few hours prior.

* Brought the definitive testimony of Joseph Newcomer to public record.

* Published the results of the Post‘s independent analysis of the documents, which found “dozens of inconsistencies [in the memos], ranging from conflicting military terminology to different word-processing techniques.”

If Kurtz truly believes that there’s a chance the CBS memos were legit, then this September 14 piece is at least very misleading and perhaps even irresponsible.

P.S. Why would this piece be misleading or irresponsible, you might ask? Kurtz and Dobbs didn’t venture their own opinions in it, right? True. But the piece is a massive marshalling of evidence, the vast preponderance of which makes the case–scientifically and persuasively–that the memos were fakes. If Kurtz thought there was another valid alternative view, he and Dobbs sure didn’t give it much air. Although, I suppose that if there’s a chance the memos are authentic, then it’s possible the Kurtz / Dobbs piece was just a massive exercise in conservative media bias.)

P.P.S. None of this is meant to bash Kurtz, who did great reporting on the CBS story. The point is to further emphasize the harmful aftereffects of the Thornburgh-Boccardi report. By flinching on the critical question of whether or not the memos were fakes, the report set up a line of defense for Mapes, Rather, and the rest of the left. By giving these partisans a position from which to hold out, unbiased reporters such as Kurtz, now face immense pressure to take the middle-ground position of agnosticism on the truth of the memos. Thornburgh and Boccardi didn’t just corrupt themselves–their ridiculous retreat into semantics put good guys (like Kurtz) into a difficult position, too.

I’m confused–what does this mean for the 72 virgins? Do they each get them? Do they split them? If so, are half of them boy-toy virgins, for the wife’s enjoyment?

Or do you not get virgins if you’re married? Or, maybe, you get virgins if you’re married, but your wife does not become a glorious martyr?

Or perhaps, the husband gets the 72 virgins and the wife–even if she is a glorious martyr–gets bupkis?

God be praised, these are hard questions.

Ed Morrissey, who’s both a gentleman and a scholar, has a distressing, unsurprising post on why the French media has intentionally under-covered the country’s rioting Youths. Morrissey quotes this Guardian interview:

Jean-Claude Dassier, the director general of the rolling news service LCI, said the prominence given to the rioters on international news networks had been “excessive” and could even be fanning the flames of the violence.

Mr Dassier said his own channel, which is owned by the private broadcaster TF1, recently decided not to show footage of burning cars.

“Politics in France is heading to the right and I don’t want rightwing politicians back in second, or even first place because we showed burning cars on television,” Mr Dassier told an audience of broadcasters at the News Xchange conference in Amsterdam today.

But of course. If only Mary Mapes would be so honest.

Scientists have discovered a 135 million-year-old skull belonging to a prehistoric ancestor of the crocodile off the coast of Argentina. According to National Geographic‘s Stefan Lovgren, “It had a head like a carnivorous dinosaur and a tail like a fish. With its massive jaws and serrated teeth, it preyed on other marine reptiles…. While other marine crocs fed on small fish, Dakosaurus hunted for marine reptiles and other large sea creatures, using its jagged teeth to bite and cut its prey.”

The Dakosaurus was threatened by only two other species, the Stevenius Irwiniensis and the much older Paulus Hoganus.

(Illustration by DAMNFX/National Geographic 2005)

If you want to wash the bad taste of David Denby out of your mouth, go read Anthony Lane’s typically brilliant review of Keira Knightley’s Pride and Prejudice:

What has happened is perfectly clear: Jane Austen has been Brontëfied. In the book, Lady Catherine appears in daylight, “too early in the morning for visitors.” The film has rightly kept the hint of social insolence but switched the hour, so that the dramatic may be shaded and inked into melodrama. The question is not whether the director was justified in that transmutation but whether he had the choice; whether any of us, as moviemakers, viewers, or readers, retain the ability–not so much the scholarly equipment as the imaginative clairvoyance–to see Austen clearly. Maybe we are doomed to view her through the smoked glass of the intervening centuries, during which the spirit of romance, and the role of the body within it, have evolved out of all recognition. Why, when Lizzie accompanies her aunt and uncle to the Peak District of England, should the film take care to set her silent upon a peak, her dress and tresses stirring in the wind, if not to drop the clanging hint that Mr. Darcy is less an icy gentleman of means than a britches-busting Heathcliff in the making?

The hint becomes a yodel toward the end, as Matthew Macfadyen strides grimly through a wet meadow, at some ungodly hour, with Keira Knightley squarely in his sights. He has donned a long coat, which sways fetchingly in the mist; obviously it was copied from a Human League video of the nineteen-eighties, but I’m damned if I can remember which one. For her part, Knightley has been crisp and quick throughout–more girl than woman than seems fit, perhaps, and a boyish girl to boot, but ready and able to hold her own in any rally of wits. Now, like the queen in “Aliens,” she extends her famous underbite and gets down to business. Widening her eyes to maximum chocolaty hue, she stares into his, which are of that sea-cold, grayish blue favored by Gestapo officers in war movies. Hero and heroine bare their feelings to each other; every misunderstanding dissolves in the dawn. In a last, despairing gesture to Georgian England, they do not kiss. Oddly, however, they do rub noses, like well-bred Eskimos, while the rising sun gleams between the tips. Elsewhere in the meadow, the world’s leading Richard Clayderman impersonator is pounding away at the keys. All in all, a heavenly moment, and only hard-asses like Lady Catherine and me will fail to be affected. Any resemblance to scenes and characters created by Miss Austen is, of course, entirely coincidental.

I supposed some of you are wondering why I haven’t taken potshots at poor Mr. Bob Dougherty, the man who spent 15 minutes glued to a Home Depot toilet seat in Louisville, Colorado, a victim of an apparent practical joke. But Dougherty is already the butt of enough jokes. His dignity has been flushed down the…

In any event, the story has taken an interesting turn: Dougherty’s been accused of having gotten stuck in another toilet in his hometown of Nederland, Colo. Is this some of sort of scam he’s trying to pull? After all, Dougherty is currently suing Home Depot for $3 million in damages for pain, humiliation, etc. (He recently took a lie detector test to prove he’d never been stuck before and passed it.)

So what happened? Someone lined the toilet seat with a substance like Krazy Glue. Dougherty sits on it, gets stuck, and asks for help. An ambulance arrives, the seat is unscrewed, and Dougherty is taken out in full public view–his rear still attached to the seat. He also says he passed out from the pain.

Here’s yet another reason to line your seat.

In case you bailed out of the O’Reilly-Mapes joust early, you may have missed this:

MAPES: Bill, in all kinds of journalistic issues in the past, reporters have gone with things they believed but they could not prove with DNA testing. They have done that. I mean…

O’REILLY: DNA testing?

MAPES: Well, that’s what the equivalent, the ink testing or something like that, which really would prove that the documents had been typed in 1972 or whatever. But by your standard, that wouldn’t have been enough either.

O’REILLY: Listen, I’ve been doing investigative reporting for almost 30 years. I’ve never lost a lawsuit. But I’ve never put anything on the air I couldn’t prove.

There’s an entire Chris Buckley novel in that exchange.

Emily Will (remember her?) clocks Mary Mapes. As the kids say, upside the head.