This New York Post Page Six entry is just plain idiotic:

MSNBC loudmouth Keith Olbermann flipped out when he opened his home mail yesterday. The acerbic host of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” was terrified when he opened a suspicious-looking letter with a California postmark and a batch of white powder poured out. A note inside warned Olbermann, who’s a frequent critic of President Bush’s policies, that it was payback for some of his on-air shtick. The caustic commentator panicked and frantically called 911 at about 12:30 a.m., sources told The Post’s Philip Messing. An NYPD HazMat unit rushed to Olbermann’s pad on Central Park South, but preliminary tests indicated the substance was harmless soap powder. However, that wasn’t enough to satisfy Olbermann, who insisted on a checkup. He asked to be taken to St. Luke’s Hospital, where doctors looked him over and sent him home. Whether they gave him a lollipop on the way out isn’t known. Olbermann had no comment.

There is not a damn thing funny about getting white powder in the mail. I don’t care if you’re a Senator, a news anchor, or just a panderer and failed sportscaster. Mocking the guy for taking the letter seriously is just dumb. I would insist on a checkup too.

This is especially obnoxious because the New York Post was a recipient of one of the actual anthrax letters. Therefore, you’d think that paper in particular would refrain from making fun of someone who takes precautions after receiving powder in the mail.

You’d think that — but you’d be wrong.

UPDATE: Ed Morrissey says almost exactly the same thing.

UPDATE x2: So does Rick Moran.

UPDATE x3: Add Hugh Hewitt as well, who also notes (as I did above) that the Post was a victim of the real anthrax attacks.

It’s great to see these three writing almost exactly the same post as I did — apparently without any of us having seen the others’ posts first.

The other day an L.A. Times article painted Republicans as more prone than Democrats to engage in negative advertising. The story had fair and balanced quotes such as this: “mudslinging is crucial to the Republican plan for this year’s midterm elections.”

The story also contained the following passage, which you should read carefully:

Republican incumbents this year began running attack ads earlier than ever. But the hardest-hitting are yet to come.

“You haven’t seen the majority of the negative ads yet,” said Carl Forti, spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee, where a staff of 10 has been deployed on opposition research.

In context, this passage makes it sound like his quote related entirely to Republican ads — as in: you haven’t seen the majority of our sleaze yet. I suspected otherwise, and said:

I bet if you were to ask Forti about that quote, he’d tell you that he meant the negative ads coming from both sides — but the story makes it sound as though he’s talking only about ads coming from Republicans. If I can track him down, I’ll ask him.

Well, today I did. I spoke with Forti briefly by phone at lunchtime. Unsurprisingly, Forti said that the quote referred to ads both from Democrats and Republicans — not merely to ads by Republicans, as the quote implies.

Forti was clearly reluctant to criticize the L.A. Times article directly. He said that Republicans have made no secret of the fact that they do opposition research and believe it to be effective. If a newspaper wants to criticize Republicans for doing that, he said, so be it. But he stressed that Democrats do just as much negative advertising, and that this is nothing new.

Was I surprised to learn that Forti’s quote was ripped out of context? No. But we should all be distressed that such one-sided pieces continue to come out of a newspaper with such wide reach and (believe it or not) respect.

Howard Kurtz follows up on that Clinton interview, which Kurtz recently implied was tougher than interviews Wallace has done with Bush officials. But Howie doesn’t note Chris Wallace’s previous tough questioning of Donald Rumsfeld, despite the fact that I had e-mailed Kurtz about it, and news of the Rumsfeld interview was all over the blogs and mentioned on Brit Hume’s show.

See Dubya has more on George Allen. Are the Allen allegations a smear job or a genuine issue? You be the judge. But one of the main witnesses (Sabato) is looking pretty weaselly.

Left unspoken — barely — is the idea that maybe he would have stopped the 9/11 attack entirely!

You want offensive Monday-morning quarterbacking? You got it, pal!

I don’t get it. A lot of people who seemingly should know better, like Allah, seem to discuss this Keith Olbermann guy as some kind of person worth paying attention to.

Isn’t he just some sports guy who is out of his depth and trying to cover it up with shameless pandering to lefties?

If there’s more to him, I don’t know what it is; I don’t really pay much attention.

Glen Phillips has created a blog about his family’s year-long trip to Europe. You can read it here. (Glen Phillips is the lead singer of Toad the Wet Sprocket, for whom we were front row center in Santa Ana recently.)

He has an amusing description of himself on the main page:

I am a singer/songwriter and father of three daughters. I had a brief moment of mainstream success as a young man which I am still in the process of recovering from. I love my family, friends, music. I think people are basically good but usually broken. I’m trying to learn how to make music for a living without it being at the expense of my family and community. I value simplicity. I create noise.

I have been listening to Glen’s last two albums quite a bit lately. It’s not “noise.” Repeated listenings are rewarded. My current project is to figure out how many of the songs on the most recent album (“Mr. Lemons”) are expressions of religious feeling. Arguably, most of them are. But I’m still not really sure.

The New York Times’s Adam Nagourney — no right-wing troglodyte he — reports tomorrow that:

Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive.

What’s that? Even Democrats go negative? But the Los Angeles Times assured us just this morning that going negative is a purely GOP strategy — and that when Dems do it, it’s merely fighting back!

But Adam Nagourney seems to say something different. Rub your eyes and shake your head vigorously — the story doesn’t change:

For Democrats, it was part of a barrage intended to tie Republican incumbents to an unpopular Congress, criticize their voting records, portray them as captives to special interests and highlight embarrassing moments from their business histories.

Nagourney tries to paint the GOP as being more personal, saying that Republicans “have zeroed in more on candidates’ personal backgrounds” — but that’s hard to reconcile with this passage:

Democrats are equally aggressive in their advertisements, going after Republicans on votes, ties to campaign contributors and, in the case of challengers, their own personal foibles.

Sounds like Democrats are plenty capable of zeroing in on personal backgrounds too.

In Tennessee, Democrats attacked Bob Corker, a Republican candidate for Senate, saying his construction company had hired illegal immigrants “while he looked the other way.”

Yup. They are.

I’m shocked — shocked! — to learn that both sides actually play this game. And to think that I trusted the Los Angeles Times!

Last night, Brit Hume’s “Political Grapevine” segment featured the following observation:

Chris Wallace’s “FOX News Sunday” interview with Bill Clinton was one of six TV appearances the former president made last week. But despite Mr. Clinton’s highly publicized objections to the recent ABC docudrama about 9/11, no one other than Wallace asked him about the aggressiveness of his pursuit of Usama bin Laden.

As for Mr. Clinton’s assertion that Wallace did not challenge the Bush administration’s pre-9/11 record on terrorism? In 2004, Wallace asked Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to answer the charge that “the Bush Administration largely ignored the threat from Al Qaeda,” before 9/11, adding, “Mr. Secretary, it sure sounds like fighting terrorism was not a top priority.”

Now where might Brit have picked up that bit?

The other day Allah said, regarding the Arizona 9/11 memorial story:

From blogs to Drudge to FNC. Tinker to Evers to Chance, baby.

We need to work DR out of the equation, though. Open up an info pipeline directly to Fox HQ.

We appear to have bypassed Drudge with the story about Wallace’s interview with Rumsfeld. Does this mean we have achieved the direct pipeline that Allah spoke of? Maybe not quite. I did have some high-powered middlemen (and middlewomen), like Insty, Power Line, Malkin, and Kaus. And Allah! But working through them is an easier trick than relying on the Fella in the Fedora.

Those damn Republicans are up to their old tricks again, with their awful negative ads. Luckily, the L.A. Times is there to tell us about it, at length — and to emphasize that attack ads are almost entirely a Republican phenomenon . . . except, of course, when beleaguered Democrats have no choice but to fight back.

The story is titled Negative Ads a Positive in GOP Strategy, with a deck headline that reads “Hoping to deflect attention from Iraq, candidates unleash personal attacks. They get voters’ attention, consultants say.” It opens:

WASHINGTON — Sinister characters are scheming in a smoke-filled room, in a television ad that depicts big campaign contributors to Bob Casey, a Democrat running for Senate in Pennsylvania.

After detailing the legal troubles that each donor faces — including an FBI investigation and jail time — the somber narrator asks, “Where does Casey hold his campaign meetings?”

The camera pulls back to show the cigar-smoking “campaign team” — behind bars.

That graphic, personal attack on the candidate challenging Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) is a particularly sharp-edged example of a key strategy in the Republican political arsenal as the party fights to keep control of Congress: going negative and personal, early and often.

My goodness.

Those damn Republicans.

And now the infamous “some critics” have their say:

(more…)

Tom Maguire takes a virtual two-by-four to the skull of Glenn Greenwald, whom Maguire terms a “lefty fabulist extraordinaire.” Maguire then backs up the charge without breaking a sweat.

Maguire notes Greenwald’s claim that it is “neoconservative mythology” to assert that Clinton’s withdrawal from Somalia emboldened bin Laden. Then Maguire provides this quote:

After a few blows, [the United States] forgot all about those titles and rushed out of Somalia in shame and disgrace, dragging the bodies of its soldiers. America stopped calling itself world leader and master of the new world order, and its politicians realized that those titles were too big for them and that they were unworthy of them. I was in Sudan when this happened. I was very happy to learn of that great defeat that America suffered, so was every Muslim….

The speaker? You guessed it! Why, that would be Osama bin Laden!

Of course, Greenwald blames the withdrawal on Republicans. And here is where it gets even better. Maguire shows how Greenwald’s links cannot be trusted, as they end up representing the opposite of what Greenwald claims they assert.

Who would have ever thunk it? Besides Xrlq, that is . . .

iowahawk has the first draft of that Arizona 9/11 memorial — you know, the one with those crazy slogans in ALL CAPS. My favorite:

CONTROLLED DEMOLITION? OKAY, I KNOW IT SOUNDS KINDA TINFOIL BUT HEY I’M JUST SAYIN’ IS ALL

Read it all.