Damian Penny reports:

US Ambassador Ronald Neumann was condemned yesterday for paying public tribute to Israeli civilians killed in the Palestinian conflict.

Organisers and student delegates at the opening of the Bahrain Model United Nations Assembly (Bahmun) were furious.

Officials, guest and delegates had just stood for a minute's silence for Palestinian victims of Israeli brutality, during the ceremony, at the Bahrain Internation-al Exhibition Centre.

Mr Neumann, chief guest at the event, stayed on his feet and asked for a further minute's silence for Israeli civilians who had been killed.

He was ruled out of order and told to sit down by officials at the event, organised by Adliya Rotary Club, under the patronage of Edu-cation Minister Dr Mohammed Al Gha-tam.

Club president Redha Faraj later refused to accept a $5,000 (BD1,890) cheque from Mr Neumann, promised earlier by former US ambassador Johnny Young towards Bahmun expenses.

"We rejected the cheque as a protest at Mr Neumann's reaction," said Mr Faraj.

Now, don't get mad until you read this all the way through. Imagine that you're at a diplomatic dinner in the U.S. Before dinner, an American offical asks for a moment of silence for the victims of September 11th. Afterwards, a Saudi diplomat asks for a moment of silence for Afghan civilians killed during the campaign to eliminate the Taliban.

How would you feel? Would you remain standing? I guess that I probably would; I imagine that most Americans wish that the Taliban could have been eliminated without civilian casualties, who are as human as the victims of September 11th. But I would deeply resent the imputed moral equivalence between the actions of the terrorists and the actions of the U.S. military. If the Saudi diplomat got shouted down, I wouldn't care.

"So what? Are you equating the two scenarios?" Not at all, but I fear that these Bahraini delegates would. I'm alarmed at the parallels between my feelings and those of the delegates. If I understand them correctly, they felt that showing the same respect to Israeli dead as Palestinian dead is outrageous. They believe that the actions of the Israelis have no justification. In contrast, they believe that the Israeli civilians killed by Palestinian gunmen and suicide bombers are understandable causalities of a just war. They seem to find it blasphemous to consider the actions of the Israelis as moral as those of the suicide bombers. Hence their outrage.

The kind of people who attend a Model U.N. are educated teenagers interested in politics. How can there ever be peace?

One more for Eve: She was looking for things that make the U.S. distinctive. There is a fantastic and entertaining little book that hasn't been published in the US called "Bring the Revolution Home". It was written by a British reporter who lived in Washington for a few years on the U.S. beat. He became quite enamored of the American system of government, and wrote this book about why the UK would be better off if they dumped the monarchy and adopted the principles of the American Constitution and the American sense of self-reliance.

If I get really bored this weekend, I'll start posting excerpts, but I'll tell you in advance that I rarely get that bored. Interested readers could order it from Amazon UK, though.

UPDATE: The reader reviews are a hoot. I especially liked this line:

America has it's faults, that's true, but it certainly makes one look at our distorted 'democracy' in a totally different way - you can tell an awful lot about a country that has the 'Royal Mint' and the 'National Debt'.

Eve and Shamed have cogent responses to my post on welfare, which I'm going to have to respond to soon.

Virginia Postrel had some of the same thoughts that occured to me when I read Norah Vincent's column about blogging which began, "The Internet is irritating the liberal establishment." Whereas they bubbled around, half-formed and quickly forgotten, in my head, she turned them into a swell post. In short:

What's great about blogs is that they open the national debate to people in places outside the Bos-Wash corridor, to people whose credentials are unusual, to nonjournalists with specialized knowledge, to people who aren't graduates of the Harvard Crimson, to people who've never worked for Marty Peretz, Irving Kristol, or Bill Buckley. That diversity has nothing to do with Norah Vincent's column. It doesn't serve the sort of victimhood politics so beloved on the right. And it's too complicated for conventional commentary.

I will probably never be the top search pick for "Ted" or "Barlow". But I can console myself with the knowledge that, according to Google, I'm the #2 source on the whole web for information on "Celine bestiality".

I just went over to Shamed and saw that he was disagreeing with the same Matthew Yglesias piece that I just praised. I tend to think that he's misreading it. The argument that Yglesias is making, and I agree with, is not that George W. Bush is having a hard time making up his mind. It's that strong parties within the administration are pushing in opposite directions, sometimes on the same day.

When you have the State department signing resolutions asking Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories within two days of military spokesmen apparently giving Israel the green light, it's hard not to see that as schitzophrenic. That's not because George W. Bush is having a hard time figuring out what he wants, unless you want to pretend that they're all acting out the express wishes of Bush. But no one believes that, do they? Rather, it's because his hands-off management style gives a free hand to a few parties who, by all appearances, have a very different assesment of the right thing to do in the Middle East.

I doubt that Shamed will agree with this, either, but I want to make sure that we're disagreeing about the same thing.

One more thing: he says that Yglesias thinks it's okay to criticize the administration because "nobody will call him a traitor for saying so". I sure hope not, and I resent the implication.

What he said.

Instapundit has been debating whether Bush has been going wobbly on Israel for some time now, or whether it's a rope-a-dope. I think that Matthew Yglesias gets it right: Bush's approach to the Middle East seems incoherent because it is incoherent. It's the inevitable result of a weak President with very strong advisors. When the advisors have different agendas on an important, highly public issue, the cracks are visible.

The result, however, of Bush's "laid back" management style has been that a great deal of responsibility has been devolved to his subordinates. This is fine most of the time. In fact, pre-September 11 when the administration was pushing a number of more-or-less discrete policy initiatives (tax cuts, an education bill, some regulatory reforms, a missile defense shield) as it gave greater discipline to the way in which each individual initiative was pursued....

To get a sense of how much this administration lacks a strong center, consider the fact that you probably recognize the name of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. Do you have any idea who Clinton's Deputy Defense Secretary was? Of course not. Can you even name all three of Clinton's Defense Secretaries? How much can you tell me about the disagreements between Madelein Albright and Bill Cohen? Warren Christopher and Les Aspin? Nothing, right? Because when Clinton did some, for better or for worse, Clinton did it. Even a casual watcher of the Bush administration can detect which moves bare the stamp of Rove (steel tarrifs), Hughes (axis of evil), Powell ("consulting" with allies), or Rumsfeld (letting the daisy cutters do the talking).

The result of all this is that when Bush makes a statement that's primarily a job for Hughes and the speachwriting team we get lots of tough talk both because she probably believes in it and also because mealy-mouthed appeasement makes for shitty oratory, but when day-to-day management of the situation passes to the State Department everything changes. The Rumsfeld shows up and starts talking and it's not clear whether what he says is authoritative or not because it's not a DoD issue per se and if you ask Ari Fleischer he'll just deny that the administration's been contradicting itself all over town.

It should go without saying that I have absolutely zero inside information about the Bush administration, but this rings entirely true to me. Go read the whole thing.

I love this line: "Penelope Cruz couldn't make the sentence "I want a sandwich" sound convincing if she were dying in the middle of the Sahara and a vendor wandered by with a cooler full of sandwiches."

Also, Grim Amusements is chock full of goodness. I don't know how I missed it, but it's in the permalinks.

Funny article about how the Bush administration kept its Social Security report safe from terrorists.

This is pretty cool- a long, detailed debunking of the pop personal finance book "Rich Dad, Poor Dad."

From the Rocky Mountain News, link from Bartcop:

When President Bush's Treasury secretary, Paul O'Neill, told congressional leaders this week that he planned to borrow tens of billions of dollars from federal employee retirement accounts to avoid a government default, Republicans in Congress just shrugged.

"A Treasury secretary's gotta do what a Treasury secretary's gotta do" seemed to be the attitude.

When President Clinton's Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, did the same thing in 1995-96, House Republicans threatened to impeach him. House Rules Committee Chairman Gerald Solomon, R-N.Y., said he would "support impeachment proceedings should (Rubin) continue to bypass the Constitution." Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., said he might launch hearings "dedicated to a political resolution of this matter," i.e., force Rubin from office.

I wasn't paying close enough attention in 1995-1996, so could someone remind me why the Republicans thought that this was an appropriate action at the time? I'm thinking very bad things about the GOP right now, but I'll bite my lip.

Political cartoons through the ages. So, so fresh.

The personality quiz to end all personality quizzes: What Completely Random Person or Thing are You?

Eve Tushnet reproduces a letter I wrote to her in response to this post about indications that you might not be a liberal anymore. I thought that it might be interesting to reveal what my specific reactions were to her eight points.

You may not be a liberal anymore if...

* You think free trade is fair trade. I agree. Free trade, freely entered into by both parties, is mutually beneficial to both parties; otherwise, they wouldn't have engaged in it. I probably worry more about anti-competitive practices than the average libertarian, but we're sharing the same underlying assumption.
* You cheer for Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. They're the leaders of the U.S. military; you've got to cheer for the good guys. I desperately want our military to win where it's engaged, in no small part because my brother's in the Army.
* You think "caring about the poor" means welfare reform, school vouchers, and volunteering at your local homeless shelter. Ah, here we have problems. Welfare reform has worked out as well as anyone dared dream, and strong volunteer organizations are one of the highest achievements of civilization. (I've got problems with vouchers, which I won't get into now.) Maybe that's all Eve meant, and I should shut up. But charity is not enough to replace the public social safety net, not by a long shot. Private charity makes up a tiny proportion of public assistance (I've heard that it's about 1%, but I can't find a source right now). I don't know how much of that goes to helping the poor, but it's far less than 100%.

I've heard a lot of full-throated assertions that public assistance crowds out private charity, but I haven't seen much evidence that private charity could fill the gap if public assistance is scaled back. According to this sympathetic review of a Cato Institute book about abolishing welfare, the author's own data shows that every dollar cut out of government welfare will only produce 5 cents in charitable funding. I'm not even sure that it's that high.

Only a tiny share of charitable contributions made to nonprofits is devoted to helping the less fortunate. The rest goes to services used by the donors themselves. More than 85 percent of contributions, even to churches, are channeled into administrative and maintenance costs. Despite Olasky's faith in the power of churches to handle welfare, they rarely minister outside their congregations.

Is this likely to change if the welfare state is pared back? Obviously, this is a crucial question, but the Republicans have made no serious effort to predict the impact of their experiment. Conservative apologists for stripping the welfare state argue that the impulse to help the poor through welfare can be divorced from the impulse to help them through charity. The facts, unfortunately, do not cooperate with this fantasy. Communities less generous in their state and local public-sector assistance for the poor are also less generous in their charitable contributions. In Olasky's home state of Texas, to take one example, donations per employee to United Way campaigns in the late 1980s were $19 in Austin, $38 in Dallas, $39 in Fort Worth, $38 in Houston, and $41 in San Antonio. In comparison, employees in Cincinnati gave $60, in Cleveland $69, and in Columbus $59. The results are similar for the national disease campaigns and fundraisers for public radio and television. The pattern holds true across the country, even taking into account poverty rates and income.

85% for administrative and maintenence costs sounds a little high. They may be counting as charity tax-deductable contributions that keep non-profit institutions like churches, universities and public radio running. But the average full-fledged charity spends about 20% of its income just on fund-raising, before administrative costs. Again, private charity is a beautiful and noble thing, but it seems delusional to think that it's going to increase 100-fold if the government got out of the welfare business.

* You think the West is just better. Yeah, pretty much. I dig a lot of Asian stuff, but that doesn't make Asia better.
* You think unions screw the working man. Unions are capable of some pretty bad things. But I think it's essential that there's a counterweight to business interests when it comes to labor negotiations, and collective bargaining is that counterweight.
* You find yourself saying stuff like, "I didn't change--the liberals changed!" No, I don't say that.
* Your ideal presidential candidate is Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or James Lileks. Colin Powell would make a swell presidential candidate. Condi I don't know enough about. James Lileks seems to be a talented writer and very good guy, but come on.

No? That wasn't interesting? Sorry.

I haven't read "The Skeptical Environmentalist", so I can't say anything about it. But Paul Orwin, who's an actual scientist, has some thoughts that are well worth reading.

Tom Tomorrow does a good job pointing out how stubborn and irrational Andrew Sullivan can be. When he gets something completely wrong (he accused Moore of ignoring the War on Terror in "Stupid White Men", when his book was completed and sitting in a warehouse on September 11), he didn't just say "whoops". Instead, he accuses the people who accurately report the fact that he screwed up of conducting a "left-wing jihad." Wow, I'm actually pretty offended by that- these are legitimate criticisms, and the people writing them don't deserve to be smeared like that.

He accuses Jim Romesko of having a "gay left agenda" (what?), and accuses SpinSanity of having an unnamed agenda of his own on the same day that SpinSanity publishes a detailed account of the faults and mistakes in Stupid White Men. This is not Sully's finest hour, and I hope that it isn't just left-wingers who call him on it.

UPDATE: And another thing, from Media Whores Online:

Andrew Sullivan writes about a piece on CNN.com praising Michael Moore...

"Remember that [Michael Moore's] book has chapters called "Kill Whitey," and "Idiot Nation." It argues that president Bush is the beneficiary of a coup. In case you haven't got the message that Moore is a vital dissenter, brave and true, opposed only by the crazy far right, there's a puffy book review as well. Let's say there's a similar figure on the far right. How about Patrick Buchanan? Or even, say, Ann Coulter? Can you imagine in a million years a similar soft-lens approach being meted out to him or her? Walter, you've still got some work to do."

What's Sully talking about? The hopelessly misguided Buchanan and insane Coulter are CNN commentators.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Brendan Nyhan at SpinSanity takes on Sullivan's temper tantrum:

While it's true that the book could have been changed (although the publisher reportedly wanted Moore to pay for it), it's obviously disingenuous to use this as a justification for something Sullivan wrote before he knew about any of this. Let me reiterate: there is no mention of the war on terrorism in the book because it was written before September 11. None. Not "barely a mention". None. As Tom Tomorrow pointed out, "barely a mention" conveys the clear impression that Moore wrote the book after September 11 and intentionally avoided mentioning the war – a misleading suggestion at best.

Isn't it kind of funny that Nyhan is being called a "a supporter and former sponsor of Moore's" by Andrew Sullivan and a "Bush apologist" by Ted Rall? Look at what happens to a commentator who makes an earnest effort to be bipartisan. You wonder why I'm skeptical of politically-motivated evaluations of media bias?

U.S. rejects study by its own Arctic scientists

Why? Because "its own scientists warned that oil exploration in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge could endanger wildlife, especially musk oxen and the huge Porcupine caribou herd."

Here's my favorite detail:

Authors of the study, which was based on 12 years of research, were given 10 days to come up with another study that would take into account environmental safeguards that the administration contends its plan would include.

Here's my second favorite detail:

The authors were blocked for several hours Friday from posting the study on the Internet.

During that time, Norton's press secretary, Mark Pfeifle, issued statements saying that the study did not take into account environmental protections anticipated by the president's plan and relied on "science fiction" scenarios to reach its conclusions.

Bush keeps saying his environmental decisions are based on "sound science." Just not the kind of sound science that, you know, his own scientists produce. Will we have to wait for the sound science from the boys at Texaco before we actually know what impact drilling the Alaskan Wildlife Reserve will have?

New Celine Dion album won't play in computer CD players

Now if they could just invent a Celine Dion CD that didn't work in any CD players, the world would be a better place.

Three bite-sized outrages:

1. Assholes who riot when their sports teams win deserve every bad thing that happens to them.

2. Maryland Del. Dana Lee Dembrow was arrested for beating his wife, and he complains, "I'm afraid this really hurts me. This may destroy me." Well, no shit. If it doesn't destroy him, I will lose a lot of faith in democracy. If the Democrats can't find a better candiate than a self-pitying wife-beater, they'd better lose.

3. I suppose that I'm picking on a columnist for being honest, but isn't it obviously unfair to complain about Halle Berry winning the Academy Award based entirely on the friggin' clip? Ileana Mercer hasn't seen "Monster's Ball", but she doesn't like what she saw. In the clip, Berry is hysterical at the death of her son. Not only were these five seconds blatantly non-Oscar-worthy, Ileana Mercer says that this "ought to have translated into a good Humphrey Bogart-type, hysteria-calming slap on the mouth." Yeah, what is the deal with women? Could they overreact any more to the death of their children? Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to go learn what kind of slap in the mouth is the good one.

Avedon Carol is on fire. In particular, check out this article about the Mark Rich pardons.

But what about the substance of the Rich pardon? It did pique my curiosity when Len Garment, former White House counsel under Richard Nixon, told New Yorker that "I don't know why he did it, but I think Clinton did the right thing." A former attorney for Rich, Garment was, of course, paid to have that opinion. So was Lewis "Scooter" Libby, Vice President Richard Cheney's chief of staff, whose law firm was paid more than $2 million to represent Rich between 1987 and 2000. Libby hasn't been taking calls from reporters, but at the insistence of Democrats he did testify last week before the House committee probing the Rich pardon.

I'd like to think that the reason you read nothing about Libby's testimony in the Democrat-Gazette and precious little anywhere else is that Republicans kept him on ice until almost 9 p.m., after TV evening news broadcasts and print reporters' deadlines.

Even so, Libby's appearance was covered live on C-SPAN. A transcript is available on The Washington Post Web site. But in a climate in which overheated pundits have denounced Clinton's action as a "sacrilege" (Charles Krauthammer) or a sign of mental illness (Andrew Sullivan), you'd think you wouldn't have to search for the sworn testimony of a high-ranking member of the Bush administration.

Particularly not in light of what Libby said. U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., led him systematically through a widely mocked New York Times article Clinton wrote explaining the pardon. Was Clinton right that other oil company executives who structured transactions like Rich did hadn't been charged with crimes?

"[T]o the best of my knowledge," Libby said, "those were generally handled civilly."

Had the Energy Department found similar transactions proper? Libby confirmed that Clinton was right about that, too. Had tax experts from Harvard and Georgetown concluded that Rich's companies hadn't cheated on their taxes and owed the government nothing? They had. Had Rich settled with the IRS for $200 million anyway? Libby confirmed it. And had the Justice Department since rejected using RICO laws in corporate tax cases?

"That's my understanding of the Justice Department manual," Libby said.

So was Clinton right when he concluded that Rich had committed no crimes?

"[B]ased on the evidence available to the defense," Libby said, "that would be correct, sir."

Uncomfortable in the spotlight, Libby did call his former client a traitor for dealing with Iran, although not in any legal sense, he made clear.

Turns out he'd phoned Rich on Jan. 22 to congratulate him on the pardon.

A dogged and resourceful attorney, Libby bobbed and weaved for quite awhile until a Democratic staff lawyer finally backed him into a corner.

"[B]ased on everything you know . . . [do] you think you could have put together a good strong case for a pardon and a defensible case if the president so issued, based on what you know?"

"Yes," Libby answered.

I will cheerfully admit that Gene Lyons is biased, but he's right, and this story has been completely buried. I always thought that if Clinton hadn't have pardoned Rich, then the conservative attack machine would have focused on the next most questionable pardon down the list, and so on, and so on. Seeing as how they doggedly attacked him and his staff for things they didn't do, like stealing from Air Force One, vandalizing the White House and setting up a gift registry, I feel confident that they would have created some kind of pardon scandal, no matter what.

I read an article yesterday that pointed out how incredibly small Israel was, but it didn't sink in for a little while. Israel's total area is about 11,000 square miles, including the West Bank and Gaza strip. That's nothing- it's just over 100 miles by 100 miles. I've biked 100 miles in a day. Houston's area is 8,778 miles.

Update: According the CIA factbook, Israel is actually only 7849 square miles, smaller than Houston.

Here are a few things to cheer me up: Seanbaby's report on the Afgan national sport, buzkashi.

And the first teaser trailer from The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers has just gone online. There are rumors that it's a fake, but decide for yourself.

Diane E. over at Letter From Gotham seems to be getting discouraged. Don't, Diane. You can turn the world on with your smile. You can take a nothing day, and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile.

Den Beste has been putting out analysis of the Middle East situation that's as good or better than anything I've read in the mainstream media. Unfortunately, it makes me want to curl up into a little ball. I've read the New Yorker piece about Saddam's gassing of the Kurds in 1988, and I'm entirely comfortable with the conclusion that a regime change is in our best interests. But, it's not that easy.

I don't understand this situation as well as a lot of people, but from what I've read, I know I'm not the only person who thinks that we're on the cusp of a massacre. Saddam has probably acheived a big portion of mutually assured destruction, and he knows that once an attack from the US begins, it will end with his death. So what is left to stop him, except his conscience? He may have smuggled God knows what into cities in the west. He doesn't need to smuggle anything into Israel, the Kurd-controlled north, or any of his neighbors in order to kill millions. He probably has enough weapons to make it horribly dangerous for us to gather large numbers of troops within missile range. People smarter than me have argued that invading Iraq will be easy because his military is even weaker than it was during the Gulf War. I'm sure that's true, but it's not what I'm worried about. Barbara Lerner (via Matthew Yglesias) has written a column saying, among other things, that we can invade Iraq from Turkey. I don't know about that; Turkey said no go to a war on Iraq when Cheney was there. So what can we do? An air war alone could do tremendous damage to whatever military targets are left standing, but there's little chance of getting Hussein himself without troops, right? Maybe we have more leverage with Turkey than I realize.

I'm more than half-convinced that attacking Iraq is the least worst option, but it seems to me that we've got to steel ourselves and realize that it is a bad, bad option. Israel may be unrecognizable when the smoke clears. There will probably be far fewer Kurds in the world. There may be plagues in Western cities. Somebody tell me I'm overreacting or cheer me up.

Mac Thompson clearly doesn't like Krispy Kreme as much as anyone. Specifically, he doesn't like them as much as me. Drool...

This seems like a good opportunity to share my favorite BBC story. When my fiancée and I first moved to London, we rented two rooms in a shared house with a motley crew of drifting Brits, Australians and Kiwis. There was a TV in the common room, and we would occasionally watch it with them.

The BBC runs a hell of a lot of documentaries, and after 10:00 or so, it's easy to find HBO-style soft-porn documentaries. They’re cheap to make, don’t require stars, and are often pretty interesting. One night, we happened to catch a documentary about bestiality, AKA zoophilia. Fair enough (oops!)

The thing is, bestiality is a very serious crime in the UK. They really, really love animals in the UK; this is a country with a Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals but only a National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. (The NSPCA was formed as an offshoot of the RSPCA, 50 years later.) In many cases, sentences for bestiality can be more severe than sentences for murder. So they couldn’t get the nice Welch farmers to mug for the cameras and talk about their yen for their sheep.

So who did they get? (Cue “The Star Spangled Banner”) We sat and watched for an hour while a short parade of our fellow Americans got in front of the camera and happily shared the stories of their relationships with their dogs and ponies. One guy was just hog-wild about it (ha!); he was the infamous guy who had actually had his Jerry Springer episode, “I Married My Horse” pulled because the producers thought it was in bad taste. At one point, he started musing, “I sometimes thing I’d like to have babies with my horse. I’m not sure if I’d want them to be humans, or horses, or sort of half-human, half-horse… I know it’s not going to happen.” There was a woman who was still indignant that her husband had left her because he kept finding her in bed with the dog. She insisted, “If he had really loved me, he wouldn’t have made me choose.” Jebus.

Anyway, at the end of the program, there were some wide eyes among our roomates. We moved out soon after that, thank God.

Andrew Sullivan is a regular Goofus and Gallant. To wit:

Bad Sully: Sullivan read this interview with Clinton yesterday, in which Clinton said:

And we know at the same time he was training people to kill me. Which was fair enough—I was trying to get him. I felt it would hurt America’s interests if we killed a lot of Afghani women and children and didn’t even get him.

In response, Sullivan says this:

All these people - from Howell Raines to Mike Kelly - Clinton cannot forgive. But you know who he can understand? Osama bin Laden... Think about that for a minute. Here's Osama bin Laden, an evil man, training people in a despicable distortion of Islam to murder innocents. He's already killed Americans. He's planning the WTC massacre. And Clinton thinks it's "fair enough" for bin Laden to try and assassinate the president of the United States because the president "was trying to get him." You want to know why I'm glad Clinton isn't president right now? Statements like that.

I'm shaking my head right now. As it happens, I use the phrase "fair enough" in conversation all the time, and it does not mean what he seems to think it means. It doesn't mean "I approve of or understand." It's just a friggin' placeholder, like "OK" or "all right". But then I guess Sullivan would have gone nuts because Clinton thought it was "all right" for bin Ladin to try to blah blah blah.

Any other human being on earth could have said a sentence like that without raising an eyebrow. I swear, the top of Sullivan's head seems to flap open when it comes to Clinton.

Good Sully: He's got a few good things today, including a media bias accusation about the New York times that has some merit. He also links to a Telegraph article about the BBC's coverage of the Queen Mum's death. I obviously haven't seen the coverage, but it sounds like they were caught ridiculously unprepared. How hard is it to predict that a 101-year old woman is going to die, and how hard is it to prepare a reel for the occasion? It sounds like the BBC (like a lot of Britain) was embarassed in retrospect by the treatment they gave to Diana, and they decided that they weren't going to do that again. But they clearly lost all sense of proportion.

He also has a link to this obnoxious Boston Globe story, which Instapundit demolishes more efficiently. I suppose that we can't all be serious print pundits like Maureen Dowd or Michelle Malkin, but we can dream, we can dream.