On Cameron Diaz:

Its obviously awesome that Cameron’s dumb little show Trippin was about rolling around in the mud in third world nightmares where alien like diseases are the number one export and “ham” on a menu is simply a space saving way to write “hamster”. And then the cameras shut down and Cameron runs back to her palatial resort and racks up million dollar tabs for personal trainers, hairdressers, and make up artists before doing her voice over to lecture the rest of us about how we should live like raccoons. Because she saw a pygmy wearing a gorilla head as a hat . . . on her vacation. Her vacation from sitting courtside at Lakers games, surfing in Malibu and banging a beautiful boy bander.

John Hinderaker has a devastating post on AP reporter Angela Brown’s latest story on Cindy Sheehan. This strikes me as the sort of reportorial misconduct that should cost someone their career. Brown reports:

Sheehan and other grieving families met with Bush about two months after her son died last year, before reports of faulty prewar intelligence surfaced and caused her to become a vocal opponent of the war.

This isn’t reporting, it’s apologetics. From Hinderaker:

. . . this claim is utterly false. Sheehan has always been a “vocal opponent of the war;” her opposition had nothing to do with “reports of faulty prewar intelligence.” By her own account, as we noted here, Sheehan was bitterly opposed to the war before her son Casey re-enlisted in August 2003 . . .

It gets worse from there.

This is the first time I can remember seeing someone admit unabashedly that they want to put politics over policy when it comes to American foreign policy. The implications for Demorats are thoroughly chilling.

Here’s the story: At lefty blog site MyDD, Jerome Armstrong took Kos superblogger Armando to task over his calls for immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Armstrong wrote:

It’s easy to say “It Is Time” for the complete withdrawal of Iraq (something that neither Feingold or Hagel would agree with), but it’s not easy to understand the political ramifications of that action.

Armando then response to another liberal blogger who has demanded at Daily Kos with stunning candor:

Well, my short answer is it is time to pummel Bush on his failures in Iraq. Well, it is past time. And you can’t pummel him if you say “stay the course.” . . . And this is what I am talking about when I say the politics comes before the policy . . .

But I want to leave this part on the front — it is because Bush won’t listen that the politics comes first — because the only way to change our disastrous Iraq policy is to change the political dynamics and the political power situation we currently are in. That means Dems winning in 2006.

There it is: On a subject involving life and death, the most important liberal blog openly admits that it isn’t concerned with determining what the right course of action is in Iraq–they’re only concerned with “pummeling” Bush.

Remember this the next time you hear them criticize the Bush administration–they’ve now admitted that their criticisms may not have anything to do with reality.

But even more important, remember this the next time a member of the Democratic establishment hunkers down to pay homage to Daily Kos.

He renewed his driver’s license! All hail the New Media! Suck on that, Paul Krugman!

(Bonus points if you guess the “he” before the jump.)

Because he’s like a blogging James Dean:

I AM a guy with a blog. One that has built a platform that allows lots and lots and lots of people to have their say and organize and advocate for their causes. People want to equate that with “leadership” and assign me “responsibilities”.

Well, what happens when i say “fuck that”? Because I’m not being falsely modest when I say I don’t want that responsibility nor power and I won’t take it. I’m simply not interested.

This site became popular because of my style, because of my voice, because of my refusal to compromise what I believe in order to appease anyone. . . . And I won’t stop doing it. As I’ve said many times before to wails of outrage — you don’t like it, it’s a huge blogosphere. Nothing is forcing anyone to read this site. . . .

I will not be the be-all end-all of the progressive blogosphere. I’m not interested. If someone pisses me off or annoys me, I’ll say so. And if I hurt some feelings, so be it. I’m not going to pussy-foot my way around the various progressive constituencies for fear of offending. Feel free to disagree with me, but don’t try to muzzle me. No one censors me. . . .

You can keep trying and build me up into something bigger and more important. It’s a wasted effort, but it’s a free country. Me, I’ll keep doing what I’ve been doing for the past three years.

Yeah, baby! That’s called Truth to Power! What’s Markos rebelling against? Whadya got?

He is like the cock of the walk, no?

If Bush can’t carry the offices of National Review, how do we think Republicans are going to do in the midterm elections?

I’m only half-serious, of course.

But Bush has largely had a Mr. Magoo presidency–every time he was about to step off the ledge, a crane lifting an I-beam appeared to catch him and lift him even higher. One would think that luck has to run out eventually, no?

It may be apostasy, but recall that pre-9/11 Bush looked like an odd-on one-termer. Remember the downed plane in China fiasco? The punting on affirmative action? The cutting of the military budget to the point of scrapping the two-war maxim? Remember how lost he looked at times?

It could be that Bush is just now regressing to the mean–settling in where he would have been had Osama bin Laden not massacred 3,000 Americans.

Or alternatively, it could be that Bush’s anti-intellectualism (a Frum reader puts this more delicately: “Rather than press his subordinates to make up for his shortcomings, the president seems inclined to think that because he’s right and/or winning elections and wars that rhetoric is empty or unimportant, when it’s often of primary importance.”) is finally exacting a price.

There’s a reason some of us went ga-ga listening to Tony Blair talk about the war on terror. Go back and read this speech. If only Bush could talk this way:

11 September was not an isolated event, but a tragic prologue, Iraq another act, and many further struggles will be set upon this stage before it’s over.

There never has been a time when the power of America was so necessary or so misunderstood, or when, except in the most general sense, a study of history provides so little instruction for our present day. . . .

The risk is that terrorism and states developing weapons of mass destruction come together.

And when people say, “That risk is fanciful,” I say we know the Taleban supported al-Qaeda.

We know Iraq under Saddam gave haven to and supported terrorists.

We know there are states in the Middle East now actively funding and helping people, who regard it as God’s will in the act of suicide to take as many innocent lives with them on their way to God’s judgment.

Some of these states are desperately trying to acquire nuclear weapons.

We know that companies and individuals with expertise sell it to the highest bidder, and we know that at least one state, North Korea, lets its people starve while spending billions of dollars on developing nuclear weapons and exporting the technology abroad.

This isn’t fantasy, it is 21st-Century reality, and it confronts us now.

Can we be sure that terrorism and weapons of mass destruction will join together?

Let us say one thing: If we are wrong, we will have destroyed a threat that at its least is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering.

That is something I am confident history will forgive.

But if our critics are wrong, if we are right, as I believe with every fibre of instinct and conviction I have that we are, and we do not act, then we will have hesitated in the face of this menace when we should have given leadership.

That is something history will not forgive.

Over the last three years I’ve had a number of Bush supporters chastise me for my Blairophilia and their complaint is always the same: Wouldn’t you rather have a leader, like Bush, who takes the right actions but can’t speak, instead of a Blair, who can speechify, but doesn’t always go the right way?

And my answer is always the same: This is America. It’s a big country. Is it really too much to ask for a president who can do both?

I love Beldar and everything, but his regional pride seems a little overweening here:

But I hope that attorney Bicks wasn’t just trying to make sure that the NYT spelled his name right for his and his firm’s marketing purposes. And I guarantee you that Ms. Lowry and her partners at Fulbright & Jaworski don’t need lawyers from New York City, nor the New York Times, to come to Texas to teach them how to try jury cases.

The last time I heard someone vouch so solidly for the genius of regional trail attorneys, it was a lawyer calling in to C-SPAN to lecture me about how John Edwards who, this lawyer insisted, was such a brilliant, Nawhth Car-o-lina trial attorney that he was going to slice and dice Dick Cheney in the VP debate.

My main man Eric Pfeiffer has been down reporting from Crawford and just did an interview with Joan Baez. Interesting excerpts:

There’s no way to ensure a peaceful transition. There’s already been so much chaos and unnecessary violence. Much of that has been created by us. But there was already this disgusting level of chaos and violence with Saddam Hussein.

We’ve just made ourselves so loathsome that whatever happens I think will be better. We have antagonized the world so much. I mean, I travel a lot. When I’m in places like Italy I memorize the Italian translation and I say, ‘I ask for your forgiveness for what my president is doing to the world. And they stand, they get up and give a standing ovation, because someone finally does get it. That’s how they see it. Granted, that is my public. But that public is pretty broad.

Sadly, Baez doesn’t finger PNAC. Maybe she should lock it up!