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Month: June 2005

Princess ‘Toot’

I’m so tired of stories like this.

Diana, Princess of Wales, took cocaine and was worried it would kill her, according to new claims today.

Friend and confidante Simone Simmons makes the claim in her controversial book Diana: The Last Word, in which she also alleges the Princess had a relationship with John F Kennedy Jr.

In the book, serialised in The Sun, Ms Simmons insists that Diana told her a boyfriend, who was a habitual user, once urged her to try the drug.

She said the experience was so frightening for the Princess that she vowed not to use it again and help addicts.

The 49-year-old said: “Diana just said he offered it to her and she asked, ‘What do you do?’ and he told her.

“It made her feel so ill. It made her feel sick, dizzy and breathless. She felt she was going to have a heart attack and die when she tried cocaine.”

The lady is DEAD. As in No Longer Living. Oh, and another thing – her KIDS ARE STILL ALIVE, and they read this crap. Worst of all, their mother cannot defend the allegations, so they just sit out there as fact. Yeah, I know she was a celebrity and all, but so what.

She’s dead, let it be.

Prime Time Bush

It used to be that when the president notified the media that he was going to make a speech to the American people, the major television networks listened. They would immediately clear their schedules and make room for the commander-in-chief. Oh the times, the are a changin. Nowadays, the big man has to compete with the likes of the ‘Average Joe’.

Three of the four broadcast networks had yet to decide late Monday whether they would carry President Bush’s speech on Iraq Tuesday in front of soldiers in Fort Bragg, N.C. By then, only ABC had said it would carry the address.

The White House formally requested an hour of primetime at 8 p.m. ET for Bush’s speech at a time when public opinion polls show the tide turning against the war in Iraq. While there was no question that the cable news channels would cover the president’s address, the broadcast networks were a tougher sell.

CBS, NBC and Fox all said they would decide sometime Tuesday whether to carry the speech. Concerns centered on the potential newsworthiness of the speech and the fact that it was being given not in the Oval Office but far from Washington.

“You want to be certain you are broadcasting something that is newsworthy and vitally important to the American people,” said one network executive who asked not to be identified.

The networks, unconvinced in initial talks with the White House late last week that the speech would be newsworthy, asked for more information. Sources said a conference call was held at 12:30 p.m. ET with officials from the Bush administration and the networks’ Washington bureau chiefs.

But that might not be the only reason for the networks’ holdout. While CBS was in repeats at 8 p.m., NBC was faced with the possibility of having to pre-empt or reschedule the heavily promoted original reality series “Average Joe: The Joes Strike Back.”

Larry Sabato, a political science professor at the University of Virginia, said Monday that it was a tough decision for the network bosses.

“On the one hand, they recognize if the president actually is going to make substantial news on Iraq, they probably should cover it,” Sabato said. “But on the other hand, they realize this White House is famous for constructing political rallies and convincing the networks to cover them with the sole beneficiary being the president, not the American people.”

Sabato is right. This cynical behavior on the part of the TV networks isn’t bias. It’s the fault of the White House, and politics in general. Politicians have cried wolf too often, and have duped the media into covering ‘news’ under false pretences.

A Point to Ponder

Did you ever notice that when you blow in a dog’s face, he gets mad at you, but when you take him for a car ride, he sticks his head out the window?

Around the Horn

MSM

  • Iraq’s prime minister says he believes two years should be enough to make his country secure.
  • An Aruba government official says authorities have released a party boat disc jockey held in the disappearance of Natalee Holloway.
  • Court Splits on Ten Commandment Displays
  • File-sharing services may be sued.
  • No Retirement Announcement.

Blogs

Blogging Hillary’s Truth – #1

As I mentioned earlier this week, I purchased and received the much talked about book ‘The Truth About Hillary‘ by Edward Klein. Now, if you’ve read more than one post on PunditGuy you know that I am no fan of Hillary Clinton. Even before opening to page one, I knew her to be a manipulative power hungry individual. Of course, I only really ‘know’ Hillary through the media. When we don’t know someone personally, we must base our opinion of them on what we see, what we hear them say, and a certain level of ‘gut’ instinct. I’ve always been a pretty good judge of people, and I have never been fooled into thinking that Hillary Clinton is anything like the person she portrays.

Over the course of the next few weeks, I’ll be commenting on Klein’s book, a few chapters at a time. I’m not trying to giveaway any of the juicy parts, nor am I attempting to read the book for you. I’ll treat ‘The Truth About Hillary’ like any article I read in the media. I’ll read it and give my short analysis.

So, let’s get started.

You may recall the book put out by Hillary in 2003 – ‘Living History‘. This is good Hillary.

Hillary_living

Doesn’t she look happy? Confident? Self assured? Ready for anything! Oh yes, that’s the woman that the DNC wants you to know and love. As far as they’re concerned, this picture could replace George Washington on the $1 dollar bill. 

But Ed Klein’s book takes a different tact. This is evil Hillary.

Hillary_klein

I work in the book publishing industry, so I’m familiar with the sales power of images and text on a book cover. Sentinel, a conservative imprint of the Penguin Group, knew just what to do with Klein’s book. If you look at the front of the book and start to tilt it to the right, you’ll feel as though Hillary is peering out from around the side of the book spine, her eyes piercing you, cold and steely. This is done for obvious reasons. Klein’s book is an unflattering expose of the ugly realities that make up Hillary Clinton. Given the subject matter of the book, any good marketer would know to find a photo that exemplifies this. Sentinel found a winner. I’m sure Bill Clinton shutters each time he sees this photo. It’s a look he probably knows all too well.

The prologue opens with Monica Lewinsky showing up to Bill’s fiftieth birthday party in August of 1996. By the time I read the second paragraph, I knew what kind of book this was going to be.

Creepy.

Icky.

Klein recounts a moment when Monica, with her back turned to Bill, reaches behind her and, touches the former president, uh, well…

Yeah, I was grossed out. Straight ahead gratuitousness on the part of Klein.

Once I recovered, it was pretty clear to me who Monica Lewinsky was during this time in her life. She was a hopeless loser. She was the scorned woman, not Hillary. Klein wastes no time proving to his readers that Monica was obsessed with Bill Clinton. I’m talked OBSESSED. Over the top. If even part of the story in the prologue is accurate, Monica is lucky she wasn’t put down by Secret Service agents. Obviously, Bill wanted her kept close. 

Klein goes on to introduce us to a side of Hillary Clinton that (for me) is pretty easy to believe. She had eyes and ears all over the White House. As such, many didn’t believe for a minute that she was unaware of Monica. In fact, many believed she not only knew about the intern, she knew of her for at least two years before Matt Drudge broke the story about the salacious affair.

Page 13 outlines what one can expect from this book. According to Ed Klein, Hillary Clinton remains one of the great mysteries of our time.

  • She is a mother but she isn’t maternal
  • She’s a wife, but she has no wifely instincts
  • She says she’s passionately in love with her husband, but many of her closest friends and aides are lesbians
  • She inspires fierce loyalty among her followers, but she frequently stabs them in the back
  • She professes to be a devout Christian, but she has cheated and lied at the drop of a hat

Everything about Hillary is ambiguous; everything she stands for, she stands for the opposite. She lacks the innate knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong, and the obligation to tell the truth.

(I plan to blog ‘The Truth About Hillary’ once a week until I’m finished with the book.)

7/09/05 UPDATE: OK, I lied. I intended to blog this book, weekly, but that didn’t happen. Oh yes, I did read it. The whole thing, and you know what? It was a complete a waste of time. The book is crap, pure and simple. I’m not saying that Klein fabricated anything in it. I’m just saying that what is in it won’t make a difference. It has not yet and won’t affect Hillary in the least. Most of what is in the book has already been reported elsewhere. In fact, the back of the book contains a bibliography citing the material Klein used and the list of books from other people goes on and on and on. Not much is original.

Don’t get me wrong – it was an entertaining read. It just wasn’t worth extracting.

eBay, here I come.

Negotiating With Terrorists?

I hope this story isn’t accurate.

Despite months of American military assaults on supposed insurgent bases, General John Abizaid, the regional US commander, admitted to Congress last week that opposition strength was “about the same” as six months ago and that “there’s a lot of work to be done against the insurgency”.

That work now includes secret negotiations with rebel leaders, according to the Iraqi sources.

Washington seems to be gingerly probing for ways of defusing home-grown Iraqi opposition and of isolating the foreign Islamic militants who have flooded into Iraq to wage holy war against America under the command of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq.

The talks appear to represent the first serious effort by Americans and Iraqi insurgents to find common ground since violence intensified in the spring. Earlier informal contacts were reported but produced no perceptible progress.

Finding common ground…why does that sound like surrender?