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The Bush v. Webb incident looks a lot different after it goes down the George Will Memory Hole...

Screengrab from NYTimes.com just a moment ago:

Not really surprising, but disappointing nonetheless.

Bush v. Webb...

The NYT's Dining section today has an "all-drinks" focus.  Some interesting reading there, including a rye tasting and an article about new specialty tonic waters.  The best thing there, though, comes in an article about new cocktails that might not sound appealing at first blush, such as the "Stray Dog" -- a pomegranate-spiked variation on the Cosmopolitan (with a touch of Pernod) that sounds pretty good.

Interesting, too, that I bought three pomegranates last night.  And that I picked up a bottle of Pernod not too long ago (I want to learn how to make Sazeracs and Corpse Revivers, so I got a bottle of Lillet as well...)  I may give the Stray Dog a whirl while I'm at it.

Will report back, as they say.

We're gonna hear a lot of this shit for the next few years, aren't we?

Right-wing blogosphere once again proves that they have no clue what they're talking about.  Powerline and Michelle Malkin lecturing about journalistic standards?  That's a bit rich.  Because, as August Pollak notes, journalism is about the truth, not just what you want to be the truth.

I also like Oliver's take:

This is not an isolated incident folks, this happens all the time. During the run-up to this year's elections I had to ask if I was crazy or what for not seeing the same reality the conservatives swore up and down that they were seeing. They claimed that the polls were rigged, that the media was engaged in a conspiracy with the Democrats, and that the Republicans would hold the House and Senate. They said this when someone could have dropped in from Mars, looked at the numbers and told Dennis Hastert to clean out his Speaker's desk and wipe up the slime trail behind him. But like they did with Iraq, Katrina, Terri Schiavo, and any of five million issues over the last ten years the right was wrong.

No, not just "wrong". Amazingly, freakishly, mind-numblingly wrong. . .

They are wrong in everything they do. They will be wrong until the cows come home, and even then they will see goats where there are only cows.

So, help me out a little here.  I'm confused:  the mission is accomplished, but it isn't complete?

Bush twins asked to withdraw from Argentina; one stays the course while the other cuts and runs.

Park Avenue Canyon, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Shocking new threat to airline security:  rubber-band balls.

This doesn't quite go into the Schadenfreude category (or, evidently, the "breaking news" one), but I was quite pleased to learn that Caitlin Flanagan's writing will no longer be polluting the best magazine in the world.

Hearst Tower, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

I was kind of pleased with this one.

Ronald McDonald prepares to eat some hapless volunteers, originally uploaded by Vidiot.

Welcome, Gothamist readers.

This Times article deserves your attention:

Perhaps only someone from Britain could genuinely believe that a personal ad beginning, “Baste me in butter and call me Slappy,” might lead to romance with an actual, nonincarcerated person.

But in the strange alternate universe that is the personals column in the London Review of Books, a fetish for even the naughtiest dairy product is considered a perfectly reasonable basis for a relationship. Rejecting the earnest self-promotion of most personal ads, the correspondents in the London Review column tend instead to present themselves as idiosyncratic, even actively repellent. . .

One recent advertiser identified himself as a 61-year-old laryngologist and amateur taxidermist looking for a woman with whom to share, among other things, dancing and cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The ad has not been a great success. When he writes the next one, the advertiser told a reporter via e-mail, “I will possibly drink less wine” . . .

Many of the ads reflect the writers’ diverse intellectual interests.

A woman in the current issue, for instance, specifies that she is looking for a man “who doesn’t name his genitals after German chancellors” (not even, the ad says, “Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingfürst, however admirable the independence he gave to secretaries of state may have been.”)

In an e-mail exchange also conducted on condition that her name not be used, the woman, a 38-year-old local government arts official with an interest in Bismarck, said she been inspired by a disastrous experience with a date who announced over the tiramisu that he called his private parts “Asquith,” after the World War I prime minister.

“I’m fairly easygoing, but I specifically didn’t want another dessert-spoiler,” she said, explaining that the only thing she could think of worse than a wartime prime minister was a pre-Weimar German chancellor.

Takin' me back: The original Video Toaster demo video from NewTek:

Music and narration by the great Ken Nordine. We must have watched this a hundred times, transfixed, in my high school TV production class.

Damn!  They changed the formula of Hellman's Mayonnaise.  Don't they realize that when they've gotten something perfect, and it's worked for decades, that they shouldn't fuck it up?

You've heard of Driving While Black?

I guess the contemporary equivalent is Flying While Muslim.

See, the racism doesn't go away -- it just becomes more socially sanctioned, I guess.

GOP Congressman -- who won re-election! -- is "very disappointed" in the voters who didn't vote for him.

Those poor voters.  You'd think it was their responsibility to choose who they wanted to represent them in Congress or something.

StockStock is back!

Standing in Hanoi a couple days ago, President Bush was asked if the US's experience in Vietnam offered lessons when dealing with the situation in Iraq.  From the AP's story (which, oddly enough, the NY Post doesn't identify as such):

Powerful reminders of the fighting three decades ago remain in Hanoi.

Asked if the experience in Vietnam offered lessons for Iraq, Bush said, "We tend to want there to be instant success in the world, and the task in Iraq is going to take a while."

He said "it's just going to take a long period of time" for "an ideology of freedom to overcome an ideology of hate. Yet, the world that we live in today is one where they want things to happen immediately."

"We'll succeed unless we quit," the president told reporters.

Excuse me?  Um, is the President thinking of the same war that I am?  I know that Dubya's main focus during the Vietnam War was staying the hell out of it.  This would explain his utter lack of knowledge of the war including such basic items as, well, who won.

Vietnam was a failure of will?  Is President Bush asserting that if Nixon and Kissinger hadn't signed the Paris Peace Accords in 1973 and withdrawn from Vietnam, the US and the Saigon government would have prevailed?  I kind of doubt that...and even if we had managed to "win", at what price?  How many more millions of dollars and thousands of lives would have been wasted?

It's long been clear that Bush doesn't learn from mistakes -- his or anyone else's -- so I'm not quite sure why I'm surprised at this.  But one would hope that we could draw greater lessons from the American experience in Vietnam than that.

Some really interesting things in the NYT this weekend:

• It's an interesting idea to contrast Clinton's and Bush's styles when they visit a foreign country:

while the difference says much about the personalities of two presidents who both famously avoided serving in the war here, it reveals a lot about how significantly times have changed — and perhaps why America’s “public diplomacy” seems unable to shift into gear.

In 2000, tens of thousands of Hanoi’s residents poured into the streets to witness the visit of the first American head of state since the end of the Vietnam War. Mr. Clinton toured the thousand-year-old Temple of Literature, grabbed lunch at a noodle shop, argued with Communist Party leaders about American imperialism and sifted the earth for the remains of a missing airman.

On Saturday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley, conceded that the president had not come into direct contact with ordinary Vietnamese, but said that they connected anyway.

“If you’d been part of the president’s motorcade as we’ve shuttled back and forth,” he said, reporters would have seen that “the president has been doing a lot of waving and getting a lot of waving and smiles.”

• Oooh, the new Wong Kar-Wai movie (his first in English) sounds interesting.
• and the PB is (briefly) interviewed.  I don't know a whole lot about her besides what I've heard in various press reports, but I like her...she seems very impressive.

In Britain, there's a dispute over the authorship of "Whiter Shade of Pale."

Ironic, no?  I'd think Johann Sebastian Bach is entitled to some royalties as well...

David Blaine will be shackled to a spinning gyroscope in Times Square.  Ho hum.

I just love how the press release says "There will be no barriers to protect him from elements like wind, rain, snow or freezing temperatures."  For those of you not in New York City, right now it's 52 degrees and cloudy.

Some GOP-stylee gloating:

Ach, I'm glad Murtha didn't win the Majority Leader post, as he seems less than concerned with ethics and is known for his earmarking prowess.  I wish Hoyer hadn't have won, either, though, as he's getting firehosed with special-interest money...and to make matters worse, broke ranks last year and voted against the draconian bankruptcy bill.  (As did Murtha.)

We need to get the corruption out of there.  Start with William "Cold Cash" Jefferson's outright bribery, then move on to earmarks.