The Kanye West Is A Prat Post.

Kanye West is a prat. End of.

The Piers Morgan Takes A Brief Vacation From Being A Knob Post.

From the Daily Mail via GQ:

Piers Morgan: Which famous women would you most like to be trapped with on a desert island?
Piers Morgan: Cindy Crawford, Scarlett Johansson and Delia Smith. I wouldn't expect the first two to do any cooking. Or wear any clothes.
PM: And who would you least like to be trapped with?
PM: Heather Mills, Cherie Blair and Princess Anne. They would irritate, enrage and bore me to death. In that order.

The vacation ends at that point, but it proves that a stopped clock does tell the right time twice a day.

The Go For It, Scott And Maureen Post.

Maureen Dowd in today's The New York Times:

They say that every president gets the psychoanalyst he deserves. And every Hamlet gets his Rosencrantz.
So now comes Scott McClellan, once the most loyal of the Texas Bushies, to reveal What Happened, as the title of his book promises, to turn W. from a genial, humble, bipartisan good ol’ boy to a delusional, disconnected, arrogant, ideological flop.
Although his analytical skills are extremely limited, the former White House press secretary — Secret Service code name Matrix — takes a stab at illuminating Junior’s bumpy and improbable boomerang journey from family black sheep and famous screw-up back to family black sheep and famous screw-up.
How did W. start out wanting to restore honor and dignity to the White House and end up scraping all the honor and dignity off the White House?
It turns out that our president is a one-man refutation of Malcolm Gladwell’s best seller Blink, about the value of trusting your gut.
Every gut instinct he had was wildly off the mark and hideously damaging to all concerned.
It seems that if you trust your gut without ever feeding your gut any facts or news or contrary opinions, if you keep your gut on a steady diet of grandiosity, ignorance, sycophants, and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, those snap decisions can be ruinous.
We already know What Happened, but it feels good to hear Scott say it. His conscience was spurred by hurt feelings.
In Washington, it is rarely the geopolitical or human consequences that cause people to turn on leaders behaving immorally. The town is far more narcissistic and practical than that.
The people who should be sounding the alarm for democracy’s sake, and the sake of all the young Americans losing lives and limbs, get truly outraged only when they are played for fools and fall guys, when their own reputations are at stake.
It was not the fake casus belli that made Colin Powell’s blood boil. What really got Powell disgusted was that W. and Dick Cheney used him, tapping into his credibility to sell their trumped-up war; that George Tenet failed to help him scrub his U.N. speech of all Cheney’s garbage; and that W. showed him the door so the more malleable Condi could have his job.
Tenet was privately worried about a war buildup not backed up by C.I.A. facts, but he only publicly sounded the alarm years later in a lucrative memoir fueled by payback, after Condi and Cheney tried to cast him as the fall guy on W.M.D.
McClellan did not realize the value of a favorite maxim — “The truth shall set you free” — until he was hung out to dry by his bosses in the Valerie Plame affair, repeating the lies Karl Rove and Scooter Libby brazenly told him about not being the leakers.
“Clearly,” McClellan says, sounding like the breast-heaving heroine of a Victorian romance, “I had allowed myself to be deceived.” He felt “something fall out of me into the abyss.”
And that was even before “the breaking point,” when he learned the worst about his idol — that the president who had denounced leaks about his warrantless surveillance program, who had promised to fire anyone leaking classified information about Plame, was himself the one who authorized Dick Cheney to let Scooter leak part of the top-secret National Intelligence Estimate.
“Yeah, I did,” Mr. Bush told his sap of a press secretary on Air Force One. His tone, the stunned McClellan said, was “as if discussing something no more important than a baseball score.”
He recalled the first time that he had begun to suspect that W. might be just another dissembling pol: when he overheard his boss, during his 2000 bid, ludicrously telling a supporter that he couldn’t remember, from his wild partying days, if he had tried cocaine.
“He isn’t the kind of person to flat-out lie,” McClellan said, but added, “I was witnessing Bush convincing himself to believe something that probably was not true.” He’d see a lot more of it over the next six years before Bush tearfully booted him out.
W.’s dwindling cadre hit back hard. In Stockholm, Condi — labeled “sometimes too accommodating” by the author — scoffed: “The president was very clear about the reasons for going to war.”
She’s right. He was very clear about it being because of W.M.D. Then he was very clear about it being to rid the world of a tyrant. Then he was very clear about it being to spread democracy. When that didn’t work out, he was very clear about it being that we can’t leave because we can’t leave.
He was always wrong, but always very clear.

The Hang On, I'll Think Of A Title Post.

This weekend, I learned...



That the mere thought of P*r*z H*lt*n induces vomiting in my mouth.

That dreaming about one member of Girls Aloud doing another one with an appliance is not helpful.

That the American football cheerleader Megan Fox is foxier than the other Megan Fox.

That my sense of smell isn't developed enough if I can't detect gas leaks at work while others can.

That the Hannah Montana movie is opening in the UK.

That my next diabetes eye screening coincides with a day off work.

That finding lots of secondhand vinyl stuff I'd like to have makes not having the ability to play it even worse.


That Hayden wearing bright-red lipstick is an aphrodisiac.

Roger Ebert writes...

Remember the scene in A Clockwork Orange where Alex has his eyes clamped open and is forced to watch a movie? I imagine a similar experience for the architects of our catastrophe in Iraq. I would like them to see No End in Sight, the story of how we were led into that war, and more than 3,000 American lives and hundreds of thousands of other lives were destroyed.

They might find the film of particular interest because they would know so many of the people appearing in it. This is not a documentary filled with anti-war activists or sitting ducks for Michael Moore. Most of the people in the film were important to the Bush administration. They had top government or military jobs, they had responsibility in Iraq or Washington, they implemented policy, they filed reports, they labored faithfully in service of U.S. foreign policy and then they left the government. Some jumped, some were pushed. They all feel disillusioned about the war and the way the White House refused to listen to them about it.

The subjects in this film now feel that American policy in Iraq was flawed from the start, that obvious measures were not taken, that sane advice was disregarded, that lies were told and believed, and that advice from people on the ground was overruled by a cabal of neo-con goofballs who seemed to form a wall around the president.

The president and his inner circle knew, just knew, for example, that Saddam had or would have weapons of mass destruction, that he was in league with al-Qaida and bin Laden, and that in some way, it was all hooked up with Sept. 11. Not all of the advice in the world could penetrate their obsession, and they fired the bearers of bad news.

It is significant, for example, that a Defense Intelligence Agency team received orders to find links between al-Qaida and Hussein. That there were none was ignored. Key adviser Paul Wolfowitz's immediate reaction to Sept. 11 was "war on Iraq." Anarchy in that land was all but assured when the Iraqi army was disbanded against urgent advice from our people in the field. That meant that a huge number of competent military men, most of them no lovers of Saddam, were rendered unemployed -- and still armed. How was this disastrous decision arrived at? People directly involved said it came as an order from administration officials who had never been to Iraq.

Did Bush know and agree? They had no indication. Perhaps not. A National Intelligence report commissioned in 2004 advised against the war. Bush, who apparently did not read it, dismissed it as guesswork -- a word that seems like an ideal description of his own policies.

Who is Charles Ferguson, director of this film? A one-time senior fellow of the Brookings Institute, software millionaire, originally a supporter of the war, visiting professor at MIT and Berkeley, he was trustworthy enough to inspire confidences from former top officials. They mostly felt that orders came from the precincts of Vice President Cheney, that Cheney's group disregarded advice from veteran American officials, and in at least one case, channeled a decision to avoid Bush's scrutiny. The president signed, but didn't read, and you can see the quizzical, betrayed looks in the eyes of the men and women in the film, who found that the more they knew about Iraq, the less they were heeded.

Although Bush and the war continue to sink in the polls, I know from some readers that they still support both. That is their right. And if they are so sure they are right, let more young men and women die or be maimed. I doubt if they will be willing to see this film, which further documents an administration playing its private war games. No, I am distinctly not comparing anyone to Hitler, but I cannot help being reminded of the stories of him in his Berlin bunker, moving nonexistent troops on a map, and issuing orders to dead generals.

Vacation Update.

Cindy: AlbaalbaalbaalbaALBA!!!!!!!

Feltz: Not taking a camera of my own along. Again. (Oh, and Perez Hilton giving her shit again. I hope he winds up thrown in prison one day.)

Cindy: Wanting to make some progress on "The Longest Weekend" Chapter Four and the CSSA chain story during my week off, and actually making some progress.

Feltz: I may not finish the former before Monday (I don't write on Sundays).

Cindy: Weather mostly good.

Feltz: Mostly.

Cindy: Wireless modem fitted by Sharon allows us to both be online at the same time.

Feltz: Thoughts not as fast as fingers. If that makes any sense.

Cindy:

Because I'm pissed off and I want to blow off steam a bit.

Question: If Perez Hilton, Victoria Newton and the folks at Hecklerspray had a fight to the death, who would win?

Answer: Us, if they all killed each other.

That is all. Good night, and good luck.