Shots in the Dark

I’m headed up to Boston for work, so the blog will be a little light today. Blog-lite, as it were.

But let me plant a thought before I go: When Dick Cheney said on Thursday night that the vote against Joe Lieberman might embolden “Al Qaeda types,” was he already aware of Britain’s impending action against the terrorist plot to blow up planes?

Which is to say, was Cheney using classified information for political purposes?

It wouldn’t be the first time….

Here’s another problem for Mel Gibson’s Christian apologists, like Bill Donohue of the Catholic League: his philandering.

Gibson has always presented himself as a devout Catholic and faithful family man, married 26 years to wife Robyn and father of seven kids; that’s been an integral part of his identity, and surely helped in the promotion of The Passion of the Christ.

But the Philly Daily News is reporting that, while shooting Signs outside Philadelphia in late 2001, Gibson was regularly shagging not one but two young lovelies in his suite at the Rittenhouse Hotel. One was a “stunning Jewish grad student at Penn”; the other was “a 31-year-old woman he first met at Rouge (205 S. 18th), where he gave her a back and shoulder massage.”

It seems a safe bet that there are more such paramours out there. What would his Christianist supporters say?

DNA World of India—don’t ask, I have no idea—reports that Kaavya Viswanathan is headed back to Harvard this fall. Not only does her plagiarism not appear to be an issue for the college, but Viswanathan has been chosen to be one of 190 “peer advising fellows.”

I leave it to you to consider the wisdom of all this.

The Indian website reports that Viswanathan “has been busy throughout the American summer boosting her self-esteem.”

No, really—it says that.

To be fair, it adds that she has been working at a group called 85 Broads, a women’s organization for former Goldman Sachs employees founded in 1999. (And if I’m not mistaken, is that Kaavya herself in a picture in the slide-show on the website, over the caption “Broad2Be Advantage,” whatever that means?)

The Washington Post is reporting that U.S. and British authorities have broken up a terrorist plot to blow up “at least” ten planes in mid-air…. The Times has it too. As does the LA Times.

Not the Globe, though…the newspaper with the worst website of any major paper in the U.S. Currently featuring breaking news about a plan to promote engineering education…..
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P.S. Half an hour later after I originally wrote this, the Globe still doesn’t have anything online.

Here’s the Globe’s Nick Cafardo on last night’s 5-4 Red Sox loss to the Royals:

Remember when Red Sox Nation was ready to panic in the streets? It was premature. But maybe now . . .

The Yankees almost blew a 7-0 lead before hanging on to beat the White Sox, 7-6, last night, increasing their lead over the Sox to three games. Two nights ago, the Yanks lost to the White Sox and the Red Sox had a chance to cut the gap to a lonely game, but they lost the first of two straight to the Royals, who are, frankly, abysmal.

What’s going on here? What say you, Red Sox Nation? Panic time?

On the Swannee River near Wildwood, Florida, yesterday, a four-foot long sturgeon jumped out of the water and hit a man riding a jet-ski. The man had to be airlifted to the hospital.

To which one can only say, good for the sturgeon….

A sturgeon and his special friend.
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* With apologies to E.B. White.

After listening to the below video again, I noticed a couple of things that I didn’t focus on the first time around.

First, in making her absurd case that Bill Clinton is secretly gay, Coulter describes Clinton as having “a whiff of the bath-house about him.”

Which is, of course, the defining characteristic of male homosexuality…if you’re a bigot.

Note also Coulter’s retort to the young, dark-haired, olive-complexioned woman who asks her how she can call herself a good Christian and use the word “fag.”

(A reasonable question.)

Coulter shoots back, “And you’re a good Christian, I suppose.”

What does that mean, exactly? Is Coulter saying that anyone who questions her is automatically “godless,” to use her word? Or suggesting, in a derogatory way, that the woman is Jewish or Muslim?

Why doesn’t Chris Matthews just have David Duke on his show and be honest about it?

Ann Coulter Calls Al Gore a “Fag”

On Hardball, Ann Coulter calls Al Gore “a total fag,” then insists it was a joke. “A smart lady,” Chris Matthews says. “We’d love to have her back.”

Ugh.

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P.S. Check out the shot of Elizabeth Dole at the very end. Um…plastic surgery much, Liddy?

Thelma Arnold’s identity was betrayed by AOL records of her Web searches,
like ones for her dog, Dudley, who clearly has a problem.

So Ned Lamont has narrowly eked out a victory over Joe Lieberman. The difference was about 3.5 percentage points.

I don’t think Lieberman can take much positive away from the tightness of the race. He’s an incumbent U.S. senator, and beating a Senate incumbent in a primary is immensely difficult and almost never happens. The senator has advantages of money (largely negated here), media exposure, experience in campaigning, infrastructure, party support, and so on. He should win handily.

What’s important is that, even with all that, Ned Lamont beat Lieberman.

Here a few thoughts on the victory.

First, the race has been framed as a referendum on the war. That’s true, but it is insufficient. Several other factors mattered as well.

1) Again and again, Connecticut voters said that they thought that Lieberman had lost touch with them. It’s true; he did. (Which is, frankly, a tough thing to do in a state the size of Connecticut, a 45-minute flight from Washington.) The proof of that is how much Lieberman was beloved by inside-the-Beltway pundits. When those folks love you, you’ve spent too much time at fancy luncheons with them and not enough time at diners with your constituents.

A corollary: Lieberman’s personality has grown tiresome over the years—the constant moralizing, the holier-than-thou tone, the aura of self-anointed gravitas. Comopare that to his counterpart, Senator Chris Dodd, who is—or at least used to be—a boozer and a poonhound. But he’s a good legislator and a good senator, and people like him. Chris Dodd isn’t going to lecture anyone. Joe Lieberman, it sometimes seemed, did little else.

2) Lamont has been portrayed as a lightweight rich guy riding the wave of anti-war sentiment, propelled along by bloggers. This overlooks the fact that the guy ran a very smart—and most important, mistake-free—campaign. Can you think of a Lamont gaffe? I can’t either. That’s extremely rare for a political novice. Lamont even held his own in a televised debate with a guy known as a ferocious debater (except, perhaps, when it comes to debating Republicans like Dick Cheney). Despite the fact that the national press seemed determined to portray him as an empty suit, Lamont fleshed out his personna and his platform over the course of the campaign, making it much harder for Lieberman to eviscerate him, which the senator was surely dying to do.

3) Lamont has also been faulted for being a Greenwich preppie, but in fact, his WASPiness is not an inherent political liability and may even be a plus. In the best WASP tradition, Lamont went to good schools, made a lot of money, gave away a lot of money, volunteered, raised what appears to be a close and healthy family, became deeply engaged in public life, and ran for public office in a state known for electing thoughtful politicians. (When I was a kid, the governor of Connecticut was an impressive woman named Ella Grasso, the first woman elected governor in the U.S.) So the fact that he’s a prepster—an object of skepticism elsewhere—doesn’t really matter in Connecticut, where we’ve seen this sort of thing before, and realize that sometimes these people make fine public servants. If that’s bland or lightweight, more of our politicians should be that way.

4) The New York Times reports that Republican National Committee chair Ken Mehlman “is planning to give a speech in Columbus, Ohio this morning in which he will use Mr. Lamont’s victory to portray Democrats as a party weak on national defense, and his affiliation with blogs to present the Democrats as captive to the extreme wing of the party.”

I think this is a huge mistake for Mehlman, in the sense that he’s tying his party more closely to an unpopular war. Lieberman’s loss doesn’t mean that the Democrats are weak on national security; it means that people really, really don’t like the Iraq war. And that’s going to hurt Republicans and politicians like Joe Lieberman.

5) Lieberman says now that he’ll run as an independent. I would be surprised if he sticks to that, but if anyone would, it’s Lieberman. Why? Because his ambition knows no bounds. It is that ambition that got him into trouble in the first place—that sense of unceasing opportunism that Lieberman always tried to portray as principles, but was, in fact, a desire to cozy up to power even when that power (Bush/Cheney) was subverting American principles of justice and decency.

Lieberman has sounded in recent weeks like a classic Washington type: the politician who has grown so accustomed to the pleasure and privileges of power that he can not believe the voters might actually reject him. The logic, the inevitability, the rightness of his position is so self-evident to him, he can not believe anyone else might disagree. He is in shock, a state of denial that reminds me of what people supposedly say they feel when having a heart attack: How could you do this to me?

But already, there are signs that powerful people want Lieberman to call it a day. John Edwards, Evan Bayh, and Hillary Clinton—moderate Democrats and presidential contenders all—quickly telephoned Ned Lamont to congratulate him. In Washington, people run from a loser; they want to avoid the contagion.

If Lieberman really cares about his party, as he claims to, he’ll abandon his independent bid, and fast. If he doesn’t, it will be apparent that the only real rationale for his campaign is pure, unadulterated, overweening, out of control ambition.