What with the mini-hullabaloo about what may or may not be Karl Rove’s pseudo-anonymous leak to Robert Novak in July about the positive identification of a CIA official (thereby violating federal law), the press is yet again in a flurry! A tizzy! Law-breaking administration officials — scandal!
Well, rest assured this scandal will go the way of missing WMD’s and budget deficits and under-funded education legislation. The President’s press secretary, Scott McClellan, stated today that an investigation will ensue if the administration happens to come across any more information regarding the leaks. This information, of course, won’t come from up on high, as this excerpted info indicates:
“Q (The President) does not know whether or not the classified information was divulged here, and he’s only getting his information from the media?
MR. McCLELLAN: No, we don’t know — we don’t have any information that’s been brought to our attention beyond what we’ve seen in the media reports.”
Well, if what Bush knows is confined to what appears in media coverage, it might help to take the President’s news-gathering habits into account, as per last week’s interview with Brit Hume from Fox News:
“HUME: How do you get your news?
BUSH: I get briefed by Andy Card and Condi in the morning. They come in and tell me…I glance at the headlines just to kind of a flavor for what’s moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves.”
How do you like those odds of there being an independent counsel to investigate this matter?
Month: September 2003
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Step up to the plate, Jessica Simpson!
There has certainly been quite the spate of recent noteworthy deaths of late, and usually in pairs of sorts; 1940s anti-icons Edward Teller and Leni Riefenstahl; “entertainment johnnies” Cash and Ritter; and Ivy-League academic types George Plimpton and Edward Said (about whom you may want to read this surprisingly touching obit by the otherwise icy-demeanored Christopher Hitchens).
With the clock ticking as such, we’d like to wish 50 Cent and Nick Lachey’s wife all the best!
Following the death of Stanley Kubrick, we were treated to dozens of personal reminiscences by colleagues and acquaintances. At first, most were by close friends of the director, but after a little while, anyone with even the most tenuous connection to him got a dollar-a-word for their memories.
With the recent death of George Plimpton we can expect a repeat of this phenomenon. At first we’ll get the Mailers, Taleses, and Remnicks of the lit world, but soon everyone who ever went to a Paris Review party or worked as an unpaid intern for the journal for two weeks before returning to Vassar will be speaking about their intimate journeys with George. That’s the thing: every Ivy League graduate who ever wrote a poem or fancied himself a short story writer has gone to at least one Paris Review event or interviewed for a job there. Heck even people who met the guy one time are sharing their memories. Even the kid from the Intellevision commercial will probably have his say sooner or later.
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New God of Sunshine
Since it opened in 2001, The Landmark Sunshine Theater has proved a nice addition to the city’s downtown art house scene. Roomier than The Quad, better sound and sight lines than The Angelika (plus no rumbling subways), and with more widely-appealing selections than Film Forum, The Sunshine became the destination of choice to see stuff like Adaptation, Bowling for Columbine, and all your other required “indie” film texts.
Sadly, I can never go there again.
Why? It seems that Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban has just bought Landmark Cinemas. If Cuban (or “Cubes” as the perpetually frat-like superrich overgrown man boy likes to be called) isn’t the most annoying zillionaire in America, he’s damn near close. This is the guy who ran around like Richie Rich on a bender for the benefit of Esquire writer Mike Sager in April 2000’s profile “Yeaahhhh Baabaabbyyy!” (Available to subscribers only.) (Quick highlight: “Cubes [is] wearing a T-shirt, upon which his girlfriend had scrawled, ‘I want you to pin my legs back like a Safeway chicken.'”) Just today, The New York Post quoted Cubes as saying, ” “Every now and then I will catch myself and look around and just smile. Anyone who says it’s a burden having this much money is a moron.” Who’s a moron, Cubes?
I’d rather sit in the coffin-like confines of the Angelika than give this guy another $10.
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Mmmmm… Crab legs
It’s official: Americans eat too fucking much. How fucking much? So fucking much that the C.O.O. of Red Lobster was let go because customers were ransacking the restaurant chain by getting seconds, thirds, and even fourths on the $22.95 “Endless Crab” dinner.
According to The New York Post, Darden Restaurants, Red Lobster’s parent company, lost $3.3 million in first-quarter profits due to customers’ bottomless stomachs. Luckily, Darden also owns The Olive Garden, home of bottomless pasta. (Incidentally, Darden also owns something called Smokey Bones; insert your own joke here.)
Pencils down Letterman, Leno, and Conan writers!
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Building a Better Mousetrap
In this post-Inside.com world of media criticism, scoops are few and far between. Unless you’re Slate‘s ineffably muckraking media crit Jack Shafer!
Shafer, who lost the magazine’s editorial stewardship to Jacob Weisberg when Michael Kinsley stepped down last year, has now posted two uber-niche media navelgazing pieces in consecutive weeks…starting with last week’s ill-conceived, contrarian-for-contrarian’s sake dismissal of “public” or “civil journalism” (which in and of itself isn’t the obscenely I.F. Stone-centric idea that Shafer makes it out to be) and culminating with today’s front-page featured article, The Rat of Baghdad – Who tattled on New York Times reporter John F. Burns to the Iraqi ministry of information?
Within, we get a sanctimonious dissection of one anonymous reporter’s “outing” of the Times’ John Burns and his criticism of Saddam Hussein to the tyrant himself. The issue? “(B)y performing his comparative literature review with the Iraqi ministry using Burns’ copy, did the unnamed American correspondent end up taunting the ministry for allowing Burns to write so damagingly? Did the unnamed American correspondent’s comparison draw an extra set of crosshairs on Burns’ forehead and put him in even greater peril? Did the unnamed correspondent encourage the Iraqis to further play one foreign correspondent off the other?”
Wow, first Daniel Pearl, and then Jayson Blair, and then…Burnsgate! Let’s hear it for (over-)reactionary New York-based self-absorption! Scoop on, Shafer!
We eagerly await the onslaught of frontpage media-crit controversies on the U.S. coalition’s shooting death of Reuters cameraman Mazen Dana or the Army’s cannon-fodder treatment of journalists in Baghdad’s Palestine hotel or the American-led interim Iraqi government’s banning of Arabic satellite television networks such as Al-Jazeera.
Wait. Maybe those stories already got their token half-day of coverage?
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From Road Trip to Pink Slip
The New York Post reports that MTV has canned The New Tom Green Show after only three months on air.
It didn’t even last as long as his marriage to Drew Barrymore
According to The Post‘s Pulitzer Prize shortlisted TV scribe, Adam Buckman, the show “drew an average 889.000 viewers nightly” during its first weeks (emphasis on poor word choice, mine).
That’s nearly a million viewers a night! That’s gotta be like a thousand times more than tuned in to Undressed or Spyder Games.
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Who’s your daddy?
“What have you done to him? What have you done to his eyes, you maniacs!”
“He has his father’s eyes.”- Rosemary’s Baby
Funnily enough, that other classic spawn of Satan film, The Omen, was released by 20th Century FOX, a division of News Corporation.
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It’s Dr. Dean
He didn’t pay good money for a medical degree for some TV critic to keep calling him “Mr.”
Hint: one’s funny on purpose.
It’s something in the nose and lips, right? Sorry, Todd. You know, it could be worse. Warren Beatty was obsessed by the fact that he resembled the sitting President; try making love to Julie Christie while she’s thinking of this guy.