The story here.

What Bennett said was perfectly defensible, standard-issue ad absurdum argument. In fact, it’s the White House that’s in the wrong, pushing cheap, anti-intellectual statements that are transparent attempts to prove they are not the racist, unfeeling bastards their enemies accuse them of being.

You might want to take a minute to vote in Patrick Ruffini’s September straw poll. Ruffini is one of the real good guys in the blogosphere: No navel gazing, no “Blog Crushes”–just serious, interesting thoughts about politics and the medium.

In the course of a post which is a pretty tough assessment of Bush’s tenure, David Frum adds this anecdote:

Harriet Miers is a capable lawyer, a hard worker, and a kind and generous person. She would be an reasonable choice for a generalist attorney, which is indeed how George W. Bush first met her. She would make an excellent trial judge: She is a careful and fair-minded listener. But US Supreme Court?

In the White House that hero worshipped the president, Miers was distinguished by the intensity of her zeal: She once told me that the president was the most brilliant man she had ever met.

I hope the Blog Crush won’t take it the wrong way if I correct him for saying that Vanity Fair doesn’t do nudes. The September 2000 issue of VF featured a couple of skin shots of Paris Hilton that were totally, shockingly out of place in the magazine. They were displayed in the course of a devastatingly awesome Nancy Jo Sales profile of the Hilton family. (Kathy Hilton comes off even worse than Paris.) Excerpts:

The River Club in New York hosted a sweet-16 party in 1998 for debutante Marissa Bregman, a friend of Nicky’s. It was covered by a reporter from the New York Times “Styles” section, and the whole story ended up as a star vehicle for Nicky. It seems that Nicky and her good friend Olympia Scarry took over, grabbing boys off the dance floor and kissing them.

And not everything made it into the Times’s account, says Patricia Eden, the River Club’s membership secretary. “There were a lot of other things that took place that I’m not going to discuss on the phone,” she says, hanging up.

Kathy doesn’t like such talk, and she doesn’t quite believe it when the Post’s “Page Six” runs an item saying Paris was doing a karaoke version of a Madonna song at the Moomba club in Manhattan wearing a coat over fishnet stockings, a see-through camisole, and a thong.

“Oh, absolutely not!” Kathy says. “The girls were singing Madonna at one of the new places in the city, and it was a lingerie party, and I know exactly the outfit Paris was wearing, and it was a little short thing with a little fur that goes around it and little shorts that go under it. It wasn’t a G-string! Paris is the most modest girl.”

And:

Rick Hilton looks up from his plate and asks, “What are Eminem’s big songs?”

Paris brightens. “Eminem? He’s so funny—he’s hysterical.”

“Eminem?” Kathy says.

“Conrad has the CD, Dad,” says Nicky. “Remember? You got mad.”

“No one has a style like his, and no one’s gonna copy him, either, ’cause he will totally embarrass them!” says Paris.

“Well, I guess I missed all that,” Kathy says.

“Does Puff Daddy perform a lot?” Rick ventures on. “What is his big song?”

Kathy looks exasperated. “Well, would ya know him if you tripped on him?”

Rick thinks a moment. “No.”

Next topic of conversation: Puffy’s legal troubles—the gun charges, bribery, assault.

“Well, just because you’re a celebrity doesn’t mean you shouldn’t get in trouble if you do something,” Paris says.

Nicky laughs.

“Oh, yeah, celebrities think that all the time,” Kathy says quickly.

“You keep interrupting me,” Paris tells her mother.

There’s a long silence.

Nicky laughs again, dryly and somewhat mysteriously.

“There are some people, I guess,” continues Paris, “who feel they can get away with anything—”

“This is just so ironic,” scoffs Nicky.

Kathy giggles nervously. “We were having this conversation last night,” she says.

No one says anything for a while. The silence is deafening.

I say, “Your eyes are so blue, Paris.”

“Yeah,” says Paris. “They’re contacts.”

Nicky says, “Mine are real.”

Whoa. Worth reading in its entirety.

Chris Levenick has an excellent piece on a bit of Robertsania that has been so far overlooked: Aside from how he is likely to function as a justice, how do we think Roberts will work as a chief justice?

Levenick thinks the outlook is good:

Needless to say, sole recourse to such soft power enormously complicates the task of leadership. But Roberts is–and has been for at least two decades–acutely attentive to the difficulties and possibilities that attend upon the office. A fine example may be found in a June 4, 1985, memo he wrote for the White House regarding the controversial case of Wallace v. Jaffree. . . .

There’s more.

Joe Loconte and Nile Gardiner have great piece at NRO on more human rights failings at the United Nations.

One of the things I love about Berlin is the escort service. Okay, I mean the ads for the escort service. They’re usually on the other side of the complimentary city map with pictures of attractive models and taglines such as:

Exclusive Lustbegleiterinnen für den anspruchsvollen Herrn! (Exclusive desirable escorts for the hard-to-please man!)

Auch exzellente Massagen (no translation needed)

Another reads:

Ein Vergnügen der besonderen Art (Enjoyment of a Special Kind)

Besuche–Escortservice–Wellnessmassagen (“Besuche” means visits.)

One simply has this text inside a heart-shape:

Escort Hotel/Wellness-massagen/Duett

Who knew they were so concerned about one’s wellness?

This story at Brain-Terminal seems like exactly the sort of thing James Piereson was talking about:

On August 29th, the Bucknell University Conservatives Club sent out a campus-wide e-mail announcing an upcoming speaker: Major John Krenson, who had been in Afghanistan “hunting terrorists.” Those two words–“hunting terrorists”–resulted in three students being called to Bucknell’s Office of the President by Kathy Owens, the Executive Assistant to the President.

According to the students, when they arrived at the President’s Office for the meeting, Ms. Owens held up a print-out of the offending e-mail and said “we have a problem here,” telling the students that the words “hunting terrorists” were offensive. For the next half-hour, the three students were given a lecture on inappropriate phrasing.