Yo, Blair: Kendall Myers, a senior State Department analyst, told an academic forum in D.C. last night that "for all Britain’s attempts to influence US policy in recent years, 'we typically ignore them and take no notice — it’s a sad business'," according to the Times of London. Apparently, the "special relationship" has now morphed into one where Americans suffer British participation out of a sense of pity. Myers went on to state that "[I]t was a done deal from the beginning, it was a one-sided relationship that was entered into with open eyes . . . there was nothing. There was no payback, no sense of reciprocity."

But maybe we'll let them win in the World Cup four years from now.

It's comforting to know that Michael Richards has at least one ally out there.

Domenick Dunne, I believe, has a very unique niche in the annals of journalism, in his ability to make the most odious of murderers and criminals seem sympathetic. Truman Capote and Norman Mailer also had that skill, but with the difference that they were trying to humanize their subjects; Dunne seems to have come upon his literary gift quite unintentionally. It is hard to read Vanity Fair and not come away with a great deal of pity and sympathy for O.J. Simpson. While any rational person would see him as a narcissistic jock who manipulated the system to get away with the murder of two innocent victims, Dunne, with his condescending tone and Westside attitude, managed to make him seem like a modern-day Bigger Thomas.

Well, Mr. Samgrass has outdone even the master. Taking as his jumping-off point the aborted release of Mr. Simpson's "confession," Christopher Hitchens manages to combine racial code (his insistance on refusing to use his subject's first name) with assorted trivialities (his discovery that O.J. may have been barely as bright as Lindsay Lohan, an odd criticism coming from the man who shed such copious tears for the late Ricky Ray Rector) and a complete lack of awareness of the underlying story (ie., his feigned empathy to the "Coleman [sic] and Goodman [sic]families." That's right: OJ murdered Gary Coleman and Benny Goodman.) On the heels of a boneheaded article about Ian Fleming that failed to distinguish between the James Bond books and the subsequent movies with the same titles, he may have finally reached his nadir. [link via Roger Ailes]

I think I'm gonna have a mancrush on Senator Webb....

For those who desire the Democratic Party become more like the Church of Scientology, or the Popular Front Era Communists, here are eight simple rules, courtesy of MyDD. To wit, Rules One and Four are inherently contradictory, Rules Two and Five are geared more towards ensuring comfortable living for campaign consultants than giving liberals more bang for their buck, Rules Three and Eight are banal, boilerplate dodges, and I have no idea what the hell Rules Six and Seven mean. Each of these eight rules could just as easily have been embraced by Tom DeLay, and I doubt it is any progressive's objective to follow a path that would so easily lead to the sort of abject defeat the Republicans suffered this year.

Wannabes [Part III]: More on the A-hole tendency among lefty bloggers, here:

There are lazy reporters and facile commentors out there. And there are, we have come to learn, actual Armstrong Williamses out there, who have no independence or integrity. They deserve a lot of scorn. But Tom Edsall and Dana Priest are not among them. Like everyone, they sometimes get things wrong. They look at facts and interpret them differently, they forget certain facts, they try to construct tight arguments and wind up misstating a case, or they don't have very good answers on the spur of the moment.

And we challenge them on it, as we should. It's a great world we live in that makes such a rapid, thorough discussion of a question possible. But the rush to find a nefarious motive (the "Armstrong Williams check"), or to disqualify a writer entirely as "drinking the Beltway Kool-Aid" doesn't further that discussion or add to our understanding.

I like the philosophy of Wikipedia: Make it easy to make mistakes and easier to correct them. Imagine how Wikipedia would be if every contributor who got something wrong were banned forever. Yet that's often the tone of these blog attacks. We're all on a quest to understand just what's gone on in our public life the last few years and how to fix it. When we see an answer we think is wrong, we can't just declare the writer a "wanker" or a "courtier-servant," or whatever. Just respond to the argument. We're all going to be wrong sometimes.

--Mark Schmitt, Tapped

The Limbaugh Doctrine: Rush has a modest proposal for solving the troubles in the Middle East:

Fine, just blow the place up. Just let these natural forces take place over there instead of trying to stop them, instead of trying to use -- I just -- sometimes natural force is going to happen. You're going to have to let it take place. You can spend all the time you like with diplomacy, and you can spend all the time you want massaging these things with diplomatic -- you're just -- you're just delaying the inevitable.

It's not quite the Pottery Barn Rule, Mistah Kurtz.

Let me be the umpteenth blogger to send kudos to Matt Welch for his well-written dissection of McCainism as a potential governing philosophy. The L.A. Times needs more Welch in the op-ed, and less everybody else....

"Be Adequite": A young actress expresses her condolences over the passing of Robert Altman. We tend to forget that the stars of stage and screen are often not that much more educated than your run-of-the-mill hoops phenom.

Bo's Last Speech: The Onion has details....

They canned Robert Scheer for this? The L.A. Times published this Erin Aubrey Kaplan gem this morning, equating Michael Richards' n-bomb response to hecklers with OJ's double homicide, which included the following:

Even O.J. neutralists like me — to this day, I'm not sure whether he did it — had to concede that the former football star belongs in some ethical netherworld occupied by other tragically deluded celebrities such as Phil Spector and Michael Jackson.

and

...the O.J. indignation is driven in large part by racial indignation: the idea that a black man may have killed a white woman and gotten away with it. That's a violation of decorum and social law that white America cannot tolerate, whatever the findings of a court — and that fact sealed O.J.'s fate long before the announcement and subsequent disappearance of "If I Did It."

Not sure whether he did it? Calling a brutal double homicide a "breach of racial decorum." If the Times must insist each week on plucking the lowest hanging fruit from the punditocracy tree, there are plenty of bloggers out there who will do the work for far less....

Wannabes [Pt. II]: More evidence why the lefty blogosphere is just like high school. [link via National Journal]

$30 million: That's the amount of money Hillary Clinton spent running against a nobody en route to an easy reelection. That's more than any other Senate candidate, and yet she still received fewer votes than Elliot Spitzer, who won the governor's race in New York.

Wannabes: One of the more thoughtful (ie., someone who posts more than two sentences at a time) bloggers on the left, Digby, writes about Maureen Dowd, describing her unfavorably as a classic "Mean Girl." Dowd made a rather over-the-top statement about the new Speaker-Elect and Botox, playing into the stereotype that a female public figure is more concerned about physical appearances and vanity than any substantive political issues, and is rightfully chastised. To Digby's credit, he/she also points out that over the past six years, liberals have been willing to look the other way when Dowd aimed her vituperation at Republicans, forgetting that she made her bones in the 90's by making shallow, catty attacks on the Clintons.

But Digby then goes on to list the characteristics of the "Mean Girl", quoting from Rosalind Wiseman's tract on the subject, Queen Bees and Wannabes, and perhaps shows an uncomfortable lack of self-awareness, to wit:

-- Her friends do what she wants them to do.
-- She can argue anyone down, including friends, peers, teachers and parents.
-- Her comments about other girls are about the lame things they did.
-- She doesn't want to invite everyone to her birthday party, and if she does, she ignores some.
-- She's charming to adults.
-- She makes other girls feel "anointed" by declaring them special friends.
-- She is affectionate to one person to show rejection of another, like throwing her arms dramatically around one girl to emphasize the exclusion of another.
-- She does not take responsibility when she hurts another's feelings.
-- She seeks revenge when she feels wronged.

In fact, each of those characteristics is typical not just of "Queen Bees" in high school, or of Beltway Insiders in general, but of the political blogosphere in particular, especially the lefty blogosphere. The lefty blogosphere is as cliqueish and centralized as any high school, with a handful of blogs at the very top, doling out links and support to others very sparingly. Those who go against them, or are critical of their favorites, end up on the receiving end of some vicious attacks, made more difficult to counter by the fact that so much of it is anonymous.

Of course, insults are usually petty and personal ("liar" and "wanker" are two of the more popular), and often targeted at the person's appearance or weight. Mistakes are rarely owned up to, like this one confusing two different Harry Byrds. Those who believe that civility and respect for others is the foundation of liberalism, from which our principles germinate, and not simply a debating ploy, are labled "concern trolls", and hooted out of the conversation. And "charming to adults?" Well, no one can smooch derrieres like a lefty blogger when in the presence of Howard Dean, Arianna Huffington, James Wolcott, or Paul Krugman.

Those who may have been baffled by the intense, out-of-proportion jihad that many bloggers had against St. Joe can better understand the phenomenum by seeing it through the prism of the childish, petty antics of the Mean Girl in reacting to someone who doesn't prostrate herself before her. Lieberman spoke critically of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal, was a cheerleader for the war and the Administration, and refused to oppose cloture on the Bankruptcy Bill or the Alito nomination. In short, he was a conservative Democrat, but he was not unlike any number of others, like Senator Nelson of Nebraska, or Senator Kohl of Wisconsin, or even candidates like Robert Casey Jr., Jim Webb, and Harold Ford Jr., who received unflinching blogospheric support. There was just something about him they didn't like. Thus, a Senator who had organized for voting rights in Mississippi in 1963, at a time when people died for doing that sort of thing, was drawn in blackface on one popular blog.

To no one's surprise, the tactics used against Senator Lieberman backfired badly, and one of most sanctimonious men in American politics got to play the role of martyr, easily winning reelection after losing his party's nomination in one of the bluest states in the country. Perhaps the lesson lies in the fact that no one really likes the Mean Girl, and that if you adopt Varuca Salt as your role model, the public will rebel.

After all St. Joe has done for his "party", it breaks my heart to see it turn its back on him now.

Rest in Peace, Bo.

UPDATE: The Dead Schembechlers disband.

Because you've been good, here's a nice little tune from forty some-odd years ago:

Yes on Murtha, No on Hastings:

1. Didn't Murtha refuse a bribe during ABSCAM? The throwaway line about how he wanted to do business with the faux-Arab for awhile before he started accepting baksheesh strikes me as the sort of thing a person uncomfortable with insulting a foreign guest might say, not a policy that congenitally crooked politicians might have towards bribetaking. In the video that's been getting play, Murtha looks like one of those saps being taken for a ride by Borat, done in by his own ingrained sense of civility, not a run-of-the-mill crook.

2. Alcee Hastings was impeached and removed from the federal bench by a Democratic Congress. Who cares if he was acquitted of related criminal charges? So was OJ. I would hope that the ethical standards for a judge would be higher than merely the code set by criminal statutes. For Hastings to leapfrog Jane Harman, merely because Pelosi is peeved at the Congresswoman, would do as much as the Democrats jumping back into bed with K Street lobbyists to discredit the notion that anything has really changed on Capital Hill.

I hope some of you have taken the time to visit my college football blog, Condredge's Acolytes, this season. If you haven't, you've missed my weekly BCS update, a recap of every matchup featuring two ranked teams, and everything you wanted to know (and a lot of what you didn't, and/or a lot of what might make you very uncomfortable knowing me afterwards) about Super-Songleader Natalie Nelson. It's a team blog, and I'm always looking for new contributors. Go Bears !!!

News You Can Use: Human-Chimp cross-breeding impossible.

Good to know....