Thursday Mystery Meat: The stupid, it burns!

· Former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, last seen impersonating Robert McNamara on an even grander scale, is receiving the Claremont Institute's "2007 Statesmanship Award" at their . . . wait for it . . . Churchill Dinner. As in Winston Churchill. Go ahead, wrap your brain around that; I'll give you a second. You may even need to have a Gatorade when you're done.

· Done? OK, now wrap your head around this: a story headlined "Lohan Plans Big 21st-Birthday Bash." OK, this is a girl who's an empirically verified drunk skank, and has spent the better part of the past year sashaying in and out of rehab like it was a changing room at Banana Republic. Why, exactly, should we give 0.001% of a shit that she's turning 21? Doesn't it seem like she's kind of been unofficially celebrating that milestone for a while now?

· Speaking of young ladies apparently in desperate need of attention, any of y'all heard about recently divorced Philadelphia news anchor Alycia Lane and the risqué photographs she sent to Rich Eisen, formerly of "SportsCenter" and currently of the NFL Network? Apparently this is far from the first time Lane decided to, uh, put herself out there for the attention of a potential suitor, though there was just one problem this time around -- Eisen is quite married, and to a real firecracker it sounds like, if his wife's reponse to Lane's e-mail is any indication. I'm glad Eisen, who's always come across as a pretty stand-up guy, didn't get drawn into any of this; as for Lane, I'm sure it's only a matter of time before her photos show up on Deadspin or The Smoking Gun or something. Not that I'm, uh, looking forward to that or anything.


All together now: You're with me, leather.

· There's a lot about this interview with "military historian" Victor Davis Hanson that should inspire eye-rolling and the making of the jerk-off gesture, but this bit is really what gets me:

All these Democrats now, for three or four years, have not just opposed George Bush, and not just opposed neoconservative idealism, but they've demonized it to such a degree that they've almost made Bush the equivalent of the enemy.

OK, let me get this straight.

For four years now -- more than four years really, if you count the run-up to the war -- anti-war liberals like myself have been insulted and condemned by people on the right. Some have merely said we're hurting the country by criticizing the incompetence of the Bush administration; some of them continue to go so far as to accuse us of colluding with the enemy because we have expressed outrage at the government's conduct in scandals such as Abu Ghraib and are calling for an end to the Iraq war. But now Victor Davis Tecumseh Bonaparte Hanson wants to complain about his side being "demonized" into "the equivalent of the enemy"? All I can say is that if "neoconservative idealism" is now regarded with the same derision as the flat-earth theory and the geocentric view of the universe, you might first want to start with the practitioners of said philosophy to see why it's become such a joke.


Tiny-violin virtuoso Rei Takahama plays a haunting solo just for Victor Davis Carmina Burana John Jacob Jingleheimer Hanson.

· On a related note, we have breaking news out of Washington, where George W. Bush has made a shocking announcement in a speech to the Associated General Contractors of America:

By the way, in the report it said, it is -- the government may have to put in more troops to be able to get to that position. And that's what we do. We put in more troops to get to a position where we can be in some other place. The question is, who ought to make that decision? The Congress or the commanders? And as you know, my position is clear -- I'm the commander guy.

What does this mean? Is Bush both the "commander guy" and the decider, who decides what is best? Or is he relinquishing his decider duties to focus on being the commander guy? If so, will he be naming an Interim Decider until an official nominee can be selected for confirmation? Or is that just going to fall to Dick Cheney by default?



· Question #1 for you readers: What do y'all think of Delta's new colors? Honestly I think they're kind of boring, but at least the airline's out of bankruptcy and hasn't gotten bought up by someone who wants to move the headquarters across the country. Given the choice between a boring color scheme and half the population of Clayton County being unemployed, I'll take the former.

· Question #2: What if the managers of all 29 major-league baseball teams who aren't the San Francisco Giants got together and agreed to intentionally walk Barry Bonds every time he came up to bat, thus depriving him of the chance to break Hank Aaron's career home-run record? Tell me, People Who Know More About Baseball Than I Do (Which Is Just About Everyone), is there a rule against that? Would they be in violation of some kind of conspiracy or anti-trust legislation?

At the very least, I think it's something that should be looked into.