The Huffington Report Post
The Huffington Report, er, The Huffington Post, isn’t trying to be the Drudge Report. Right? I mean, that’s why the wrong name (The Huffington Report) redirects to http://www.thehuffingtonpost.com. Arianna’s not worried in the least about Matt Drudge’s piddly ten year head start! Hers is a whole new concept, baby!
May 13th, 2005 at 7:55 pm
When are you adding the Huffington Report / Post to your favorite blogs list??
I have to give some credit to the designer(s). It looks *insanely* better than drudge. ;)
May 13th, 2005 at 8:27 pm
Hahah you sonofabitch.
May 15th, 2005 at 6:52 pm
DAMN. CNN just gave the Huffington Post about 15 minutes of pub. Doesn’t she get invited to enough pundit panels? I hope she gets NO traffic and this celebrity blogging thing flops. Obviously, this probably will not happen. What we’re seeing is blogging becoming even more mainstream. The average Joe Laggard who perpetually doesn’t “get it” needs to see some recognizable names before he’ll bother to investigate this blogging phenomenon. Not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
By the way Tom, you are on page 3 in the big ‘G’ search engine for “Huffington Post” and page 2 for “Huffington Report.” I only mention it because I hope you catch some of that CNN publicity glow and I want to repeat those words to help bump you up the list.
May 17th, 2005 at 12:02 am
Evan, you might suffer from the same problem Arianna does. She thinks normal folk care what the famous have to say about politics.
If you are selling a diet Julia Roberts uses, you got circulation.
If you are splattering celebrity break up news, you got circulation.
If you are telling us who’s in rehab when not on the set, you got circulation.
You take these same fu#$#ed up people and try to make them erudite and plausible in print and those WHO ACTUALLY READ PRINT are never going to be fooled. We know how vapid these folk are. I never graduated College (community at that), but I have common sense, like most folks who don’t have a publicist.
If you’re worried about those who need celebrity endorsement to “check something out”, you can’t help them until they are ready to read for themselves. Realize, they are not worth losing sleep over. As soon as they pay taxes, half of them will wake up right there.
Let CNN give her a 2-hour special. If I was a betting man, I’d go with the blog author’s estimate of 6 months.
May 18th, 2005 at 11:45 pm
I’ll also let Jon Stewart give a special on CNN giving a special
August 9th, 2005 at 10:48 am
As far as Arianna’s post goes, I like the balance to Drudge. I read both since I’m polarised neither right or left.
But. I know of Arianna from a few decades back. She wrote a book about Maria Callas that was completely full of inaccuracies and lies. Since it was not main stream, not many know of that tome. It is that particular black and white text that she undeniably penned, which indicate the veneer of credibility she has in some informed circles.
May 25th, 2006 at 3:13 pm
Arianna Huffington, whom I know very little about, is different from most celebrities in three ways: 1. She is intelligent. Very.
2. She is articulate and holds up well in a dialog. 3. She appears to care about what happens in government.
I am a proud, card carrying liberal, progressive, tree hugging, bleeding heart yellow dog democrat who watched our entire leadership scurry down a rat hole at a time in history when an agressive, articulate, courageous opposition party is most needed. I will take my allies where I find them, thank you very much.
January 11th, 2007 at 11:44 am
I might well have fully endorsed Mr. Bush’s speech
tonight had he done one more thing: announced a date
certain for US withdrawal. As it is now, his speech
simply tells the insurgents: you got me, my back is
against the wall so I’m going to scrape up the maximum
I can scrape up, 21,000 troops!
What could be a more encouraging statement to the
Jihadi, exposing our upper limits of power, as the
Bush speech tonight?
Basically, Mr. Bush announced that all he can do is
more of the same. And the “more” is not that much more
that the Jihad’s willing Shahids can be discouraged.
To add 17,000 intelligence blind, culture and language
deaf American troops– something the insurgents
gradually got better and better at killing– can not
but encourage the Jihadi to think that Bush is weakly,
not flexing but twitching, America’s last muscle. It
indeed sounds like the proverbial “death rattle” we
hear in the ICU so often as patients expire.
But if Bush had also announced a date certain for
withdrawal he would have: 1) convinced hundreds of
thousands of secular and sectarian Iraqi nationalists
that America is NOT out to take over Iraq so as to
drill forth oil there with which to flood the global
market, thus lowering oil prices; 2) convinced the
Iraqis who are nationalists determined to establish a
vibrant state in Iraq that they have only a little
time to get together and take-over their country
through coalitions for law and order.
At the same time, had he announced the date, the
insurgents would now realize that the efficacy of
Zarkawi’s action on the Samarra Mosque has lost its
effect and nationalism prevails over sectarian strife.
They would conclude– not that the Americans are
defeated– but that by announcing a date certain for
withdrawal, some time hence, Bush know something the
insurgents missed; I know them well enough to know
that they are obsessed with the idea of being tricked
out of victory by American jujitsu rather than raw
power. And there is also something the Jihadi knew all
along: that second only to those who engage in
violence as the only means available for making money,
other than corruption in government positions, the
Iraqi nationalists are the biggest group of Iraqis–
and the strongest, once united by realization that the
Americans are leaving and that their moment to make or
break has come.
British and Australian military friends expressed
amazement to me as to how poor were the supply,
logistics and billeting of American forces in Iraq.
They had never been properly supplied for this war by
the Pentagon because, from the beginning, Rumsfeld
needed it not just won but won on the cheap. And cheap
made it long and inconclusive. Bush was keeping Rummy
in place, not because they agreed on strategy as Bush
cannot think strategically, but only in order to use
him as scapegoat in November 2006, as indeed he did.
But after he got rid of Rummy and his snowflakes, Bush
had nowhere else to go than where the neocons first
pushed him. As best he could, he finally met their
demand for more troops in Iraq without any critical
strategic analysis of their ideology. On the scene
generals who opposed a bigger American “footprint” in
Iraq were simply dismissed as scapegoats the way Rummy
was.
Most frightening is that hidden in Bush’s speech was
the suggestion that Iraq is now up to the Iraqis
because we have bugger fish to fry. Buried in his
speech was the suggestion that the American people
keep an eye on the naval forces we are placing in the
Persian Gulf. Thus, Bush will be ending his
presidential career, it seems, deciding whether to
write off Iraq sometime soon (a secret withdrawal date
come what may) and compensate for total Iraq failure
with a blitzkrieg by air of Iran and Syria. Towards
that end, Sen. Coleman and other neocons made clear,
as Bush once said of binLaden relative to Iraq that,
Iraq is nothing, watch us as we prevail against Iran
and Syria.
Sadr’s Mahdi Militia is a loose federation of
Baghdad’s criminal elements some long time smugglers
and gangsters, other whose careers began with the
looting of Baghdad while American troops stood by,
much like Dumas’ depiction of the criminal society of
Paris in his novel, Hunchback of Notre Dame. Maliki’s
recent insistence that the real problem is Sunni
insurgents, not Shia militias, raises the specter of a
regional Shia-Sunni war where the Baghdad Government
speaks as a Shia regime (a choice forced on Malaki by
Bush’s reckless welcome to SCIRI’s Hakim at the White
House). Meanwhile, the Saudi declaration of support
for Anbar Province Sunni fighters, only highlights
that point: The “elected” rulers of Iraq would rather
go with Iran than be a secular nation with the US.
And, the Israeli threat to use nuclear weapons on Iran
if the US does not massively attack Iran’s nuclear
plants with conventional “bunker-busters,” also
indicates that Israel sees this American Iraq venture
as the generator of a Shia-Sunni War. This was leaked
by Netanyahu in order to destroy Olmert’s premiership.
The latter wanted a negotiated Arab-Israeli solution,
though last Summer Olmert obeyed Bush’s demand that he
attack Lebanon last Summer en route to Syria and Iran
in the hope that Bush would fill the begging ball he
came to Wash DC with last March with $10 billion. When
he saw that the war with Hezbollah was costing Israel
more than it could afford, he withdrew from Lebanon,
never moving further East. Bush, in retaliation, then
gave Bibi a green light to try to depose Olmert.
Bush has often been accused of being an ideologue.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Ideology
demands a certain capacity for abstraction, something
Bush proved himself totally incapable of throughout
his education. Consequently, his presidency is marked
by tactical domestic and foreign crisis decisions that
keep falling behind events, showing absolutely no
learning curve. Rove, at least, was more strategic,
though he too made foreign policy into mere domestic
politics (something evaded by American politicians
since the Civil War).
We are now left with indeed little more than tactical
solutions to vexing strategic problems (that Bush had
not one word for the war in Afghanistan, speaking as
if the war on terror had moved exclusively to Anbar
Province, Iraq, bespeaks Bush’s total inability to
thing en grand).
Maliki, right after Bush’s speech once again warned
Sadr that the Mahdi Army will be disarmed or destroyed
by joint US-Iraqi forces. No doubt this was forced on
him and so may well come to pass. But then SCIRI,
Iran’s puppet, will rule Baghdad and the Sunni’s fully
fed and supplied by the Arab Sunni nations block west
of Iraq, will continue fighting. Our 4,000 Marines
added to our Anbar Province force and our troops added
to our Baghdad force will only help to destroy any
prospects for Iraqi nationalism; despite the gangster
quality of their forces, both the Sadr Bloc in the
South and the Sunni Bloc in the West are true
nationalists ready to set aside sectarian issues to
bring law and order to the criminal gangs that feed
the economic gang war rather than civil war wrecking
Iraq. Also, Iran holds our troops hostage in Iraq. And
the greatest tragedy in the CIA’s total intelligence
incompetence will appear in its current misreading of
Iran’s ability and will to rain death upon our troops
in Iraq once we attack Iran.
All in all, our political tactician president has and
will, so long as he is president, miss all strategic
options because the word means nothing to him. Such
criminal negligence can only bring about his
impeachment and more disabling strife in American
politics. I can only wonder how would Gibbons
interpret America’s Bush Era “unipolar moment” today
in light of the Bush Presidency; it is not very
different, in my view, from the power usurping mad
Caesars that doomed the Roman Empire.
Daniel E. Teodoru
January 11th, 2007 at 5:46 pm
Tell me you didn’t just write all that. How many blogs did you post it on?