Mark Steyn makes the good point that, strictly as a factual matter, Dick Durbin’s claim:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others — that had no concern for human beings.

Is ludicrous. Even if you believe–which I don’t–that every cell in every American detention facility looks like what Durbin describes, only someone who has never read accounts of life in the prisons of Stalin, Hitler, and Pol Pot could mistake this treatment for the living hell those men created. I mean, forget the death toll, the actual day-to-day treatment bears no similarity. Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot did not simply play with the temperature, blast bad music, and let prisoners pee on themselves.

That said, I’ll be surprised if anything happens to Durbin. Hugh Hewitt suggests that the Senate should censure him while Bill Kristol thinks it’s more appropriate for the Democrats to remove him from leadership, particularly following the example of how the Republicans handled Trent Lott.

But I’ll be surprised if that happens. You see, the key difference is that conservatives and Republicans in general disagreed with the sentiment Lott was expressing. So far it looks as though liberals and Democrats believe Durbin’s thoughts to be true.

Bill Whalen has an excellent piece in the San Francisco Chronicle on how Gov. Schwarzenegger can stop the slide: the California version of the nuclear option.

It’s worth keeping an eye on Daily Kos’s straw poll for 2008. With 3,662 votes cast, Wesley Clark is leading the field at 21 percent, with Hillary Clinton far behind at 9 percent.

Michael Wilbon hits the mark with his description of Robert Horry as a “closer.”

I’ve long been a member of the cult of Horry because he’s one of my favorite kind of player–the Winner.

Winners aren’t aren’t Stars–they’re a much smaller, less imposing subset–but to me they’re more interesting. The Winner is the marginal player who is always lurking around championship trophies, not contributing much of anything except for big plays down the stretch (think Danny Ainge). Horry is, even historically speaking, the Best of Breed.

Horry’s career average is only 7.5 points per game, yet he has five, going on six, championships and you could make the argument that his contributions to those victories have been so significant that at least half of those teams might not have won their titles without him on the roster.

What makes a Winner? Beats me. The psychology is so different from that of the Star player. That mystery is part of what makes him so interesting.

Side note: You could argue that two Stars–Jordan and Russell–were mixed breeds who were part Winner.

Look, even if it is a sham marriage, maybe it’ll be a good sham marriage and both Cruise and the future Mrs. Cruise will get what they want out of the relationship. Nothing but best wishes to the happy couple.

Still, I can’t help but think that we’re responsible for this engagement, and by “we,” I mean you, me, and everyone else in America who has been sniggering about the couple for the last few weeks.

Time was, Hollywood produced sham couples, the public realized it was a stunt, and everyone played along. The Cruise-Holmes affair has been mocked by everyone in America–even by CNN anchors–since Day 1. In public, in private, on blogs, on TV programs, in newspapers. No one has pretended for even a moment that this might be the real thing.

And so Tom Cruise, confronted with a hostile public and press, decided he had to take it up a level:

You don’t believe we’re dating? Fine, well we’re in love!

You don’t believe we’re in love? Fine, we’re thinking about getting engaged!

You don’t believe we might get engaged? There’s the ring, bucko. Let’s get nuts!

It reminds me of the Seinfeld episode where George has lied to his future in-laws about his house in the Hamptons and, rather than concede what they all know is a lie, he keeps upping the stakes, driving them out to the beach in the middle of the night, describing the atrium, going all the way to the end of the island, and then, finally, setting off on foot to the dunes, crying, “LET’S GET NUTS!”

This is where Cruise is now, and if we don’t all start going along with it, poor Katie will have to get pregnant on their wedding night.

Slate publishes a piece defending the art of Michael Bay.

How counterintuitive!

Yesterday’s Washington Post reported on a bizarre story of a Maryland fisherman who discovered a crab that was both male and female, as evident from the one orange and one blue claw.

The story failed to mention the crab was picked up on its way to an alternative nightclub.

Poor James Van Der Beek. I mean, really, can you imagine? He stars in Angus, gets a TV show centered around him, eats the whipped-cream bikini, even does the scary, toss-off, art-house film to turn serious . . .

But noooooo, you don’t see Tom Cruise proposing to him, do you?

When he stumbled out of his shopping-cart tent this morning under the Figaroa Street overpass and heard the news, he must have gone all kinds of crazy.

Update, 3:45 p.m.: You don’t see this nugget attached to most of the wire stories:

Holmes, who claims to be a virgin, was formerly engaged to ‘American Pie’ actor Chris Klein but spilt from him in March after five years. [emphasis added]

Where is The Superficial when we need him most?