Maureen Dowd, the high school princess, has the vapors yet again:
You'd think the one good thing about merging church and state would be that politics would be suffused with glistening Christian sentiments like "love thy neighbor," "turn the other cheek," "good will toward men," "blessed be the peacemakers" and "judge not lest you be judged."
Glenn Beck helps poor MoDo out:
It is important to reach out to Kerry voters after the election and give them an important message... [Let the video play a while - ed.]
The usual suspects at the Boston Globe do
a vast Kerry post mortem. You can tell the level of "reporting" from:
The line was the brainstorm of former US senator Max Cleland of Georgia. A close friend and Vietnam veteran who had lost both legs and his right arm in combat...
I guess they count grenade handling accidents on the way to a beer party as combat. On the other hand, they provide a new Lurch excuse story for our collections:
On the afternoon of Aug. 9, John F. Kerry stood on the lip of the Grand Canyon, about to make one of the biggest mistakes of his three-year quest for the presidency. A stiff wind was blowing across the canyon, and Kerry, whose hearing was damaged by gun blasts in Vietnam, had trouble understanding some of the questions being thrown his way. But he pressed on, coughing from the pollen blowing on the breeze.
Ryan Lizza does a better job (Via
Kaus):
It's that time again for Democrats. Kerry aides and party strategists have thrown themselves into their quadrennial post-campaign ritual of recriminations. Old scabs are being picked. Scores are being settled. Clintonites point fingers at the Kennedy wing. Longtime Kerry aides throw accusations of disloyalty at the Clintonites. Staffers from the Democratic National Committee lob bombs at staffers from the campaign. Policy wonks gripe about inept political consultants. Kerry aides who traveled on the campaign plane snipe at the aides who were based in Washington. Democrats, out of power and out of jobs, are doing what they do best: turning on one another.
Oil-for-Food Official May Have Blocked Inquiries:
Benon Sevan, the official accused of improperly receiving lucrative rights to purchase oil from Saddam Hussein's government while he was running the U.N. oil-for-food program in Iraq, discouraged his staff from probing allegations of corruption and helped block efforts by the U.N. anti-corruption unit to assess where the program was vulnerable to abuse, according to senior U.N. officials.
...
Sevan declined to be interviewed for this article. In an e-mail to friends, he said he was the target of an "intense smear campaign" by groups seeking to discredit the United Nations and prevent it from returning to Iraq. He defended the program as making "a real difference in the daily lives of the average Iraqi people."
'We have let things slip, and let extremists live under our noses':
The Netherlands, with its reputation for liberalism, tolerance and freedom of speech, has never been so divided. Since the murder of the filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a radical Muslim a fortnight ago, the country's 30-year-old experiment in tolerant multi-culturalism has begun to fail. [Since? Begun? - ed.]
She's kidding, right?:
Mindy McAdams, a University of Florida journalism professor, applauded bloggers' efforts but urged them to adhere to ethical standards held by mainstream journalists.
And in related news:
Jayson Blair, the diminutive ex-journalist who shook up the mighty New York Times when his serial plagiarism was revealed last year, has all but evaporated from public view.
Now seeing a psychiatrist and a psychologist and working out of a basement office in his parents' home in Centreville, Va., he says he has found God and thinks he has a calling other than journalism — although he's not sure what it is yet.
