The Dish

David Adesnik limns the similarities.

This anti-Hillary poster is sick.

Dick Morris puts the boot in at NRO. It’s a truly creepy story, if true. Bill assaults Morris. Hillary covers for Bill’s assault. Almost a metaphor for Clinton’s relationship with his women.

Midway through Pledge Week we’ve received contributions from 1,300 new members. To keep this website strong and to help us reach our goal of 3,000 new subscribers, please consider becoming a supporting member. We’re only going to bug you for one more day. So give it a shot. For details click here.

LET THEM INVESTIGATE: The Republicans are dumb and paranoid to try and stop a full-fledged investigation into the intelligence findings that provided the basis for one of the main arguments for the war against Saddam. It’s important that any flaws in intelligence are fully explored; and any hype that might have been added to the data should be fully exposed and examined. If the administration has nothing to hide – and I doubt it has – let the light in. These Republicans are acting like, er, well, the Clintons.

HILLARY’S DIARY: Private Eye, the British satire magazine, has the scoop:

Bill Clinton and I started a conversation in the spring of 1971. It began when I said “Put it away!” and he replied, “Sorry, honey.” I just loved the way he looked so full of shame. More than 30 years later, we’re still having that same conversation.
Would we throw it all away? Bill still had that infectious optimism I had been so attracted by all those years ago. But if I gave it one hundred per cent, that was something I could knock on the head.
Bill had betrayed the trust in our marriage. As his wife, I wanted to wring Bill’s neck. But he was not only my husband, he was also my President. I would have to go deep inside myself and my faith to discover any remaining belief in our marriage, to find some path to understanding. After a long, hard search, we found that abiding agreement, and we felt able to sign it in the presence of our lawyers.

It gets better.

“I could hardly breathe. Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at Donald and Dick and Condoleezza: ‘What are you saying? Why did you lie to me? What do you mean, there were no weapons of mass destruction?'” – president George W. Bush, as imagined by Francine Prose.

HILLARY SUCK-UP WATCH: “The woman [HRC] is stronger than Queen Elizabeth I of England, a greater strategist than Catherine the Great of Russia, braver than Boadicea or the Amazons of old. And yet the demands of fame in America are such that she has to grovel to the appalling level of reality TV to get our undivided attention. The fault, dear readers, is not in Hillary, but in our ghastly mass media, which only applauds brainy women when we are reduced to tears.” – Erica Jong, the New York Observer.

THE DEMS AND SADDAM’S WMDs: They were once as unequivocal as the Bush administration. And right.

Check out the extraordinary work of one David Nishimura on the Iraq museum question. He owned this story from the beginning and completely out-foxed all the major media. Check out this array of stories: an astonishing indication of how blogs are beginning to be among the most reliable forms of news out there.

ONE HACK STILL GETS IT WRONG: I missed this recent column of Frank Rich’s on the alleged ransacking of the National Museum in Baghdad. He repeats almost the same non-facts as his previous column, makes no attempt to correct the record and goes on:

[O]ur government is now trying to cover up its culpability in the desecration of the Baghdad museum with smoke bombs of spin. On May 7, Lt. Gen. William Wallace told reporters that “as few as 17 items” in the National Museum were unaccounted for – a figure that then allowed administration apologists to minimize the tragedy. But this and other low-ball American estimates of loss are, as one Unesco fact-finder told The International Herald Tribune last week, “a distortion of reality.” The U.N.’s team of experts estimates that at least 2,000 to 3,000 pieces are missing from the museum and that the entire two million volumes in the National Library and Archives are ash.

Will Rich correct? Should he read more blogs? Or will he pull a Dowd?

REGIONS OF MIND: The wonderful blog by Geitner Simmons now has a new address. Check it out. While I’m at it, here’s a promising newcomer as well.

Walter Duranty’s New York Times Pulitzer – for lying for a mass-murderer – is again under review. The Pulitzer in general is a rigged palaver, of course – the establishment patting its own back. Even so, this particular excrescence should obviously be revoked. Would they still be honoring a fascist-sympathizer who minimized Hitler’s massacre of the Jews?

MORE HILLARYISMS: Byron York has the goods on her lies about her role in Travelgate.

CORRECTION: I’m sad to say I goofed on the issue of same-sex marriage rights in Holland and Belgium. Holland expanded its legal partnerships for gay couples into full marriage rights on 21 December 2000, and they became legal in April 2001. Belgium did the same earlier this year. The Canadian marriages were among the first – because they have been back-dated to 2001. But the decision is not the first in the West. One correspondent who pointed this out to me added:

Whoa! While it’s true that the Danes have only gone so far, the Dutch do, in fact, have true marriage for gay and lesbian couples, indistinguishable from marriage for straight folks. “Gay” marriage is not covered by a separate law; the old marriage law has simple been enlarged to cover us as well. And that’s why this American boy moved to Amsterdam. – Gary Penn, married to Stefan Oppers since September 15, 2000.

Congrats, Gary and Stefan. You’re among the first foreign married couples not to be recognized in the United States.

The BBC World anchor, Nik Gowing, goes in for a paranoid rant about how governments – meaning Western governments – are trying to murder journalists who are doing their job in the Middle East. All this at the World Association of Newspapers Congress in Dublin. He cites the now disproved story of an alleged massacre in Jenin, as if he still believes it took place. Blog Irish is on the case.

Here’s why I still love the New York Times. The combination of writer Johnny Apple and the subject of English clotted cream is an inspired one. And this is one assignment I’m quite sure Apple executed without even the thought of using a stringer.

Yesterday was as strong as Monday in new memberships for the site – roughly 1,000 total so far, well along the way to our Pledge Week goal of 3,000. Thanks so much for helping – especially all the newcomers in the last few months. If you want to join, the process couldn’t be easier: check out how here. I’m also immensely grateful for long-time readers who have donated a second time. If we keep up this pace this week, we’ll truly establish this site financially, with a future we can start planning for with confidence. If you read this page regularly please help us keep it going by chipping in.