The much-touted breathlessly-anticipated Huffington Post — a blog-site edited by Arianna Huffington, neo-con socialite-turned-socialist, where the Hollywood glittterati blog speak to the Huddled Masses — debuts this morning, and all I can say it ….. Yawn! Here’s Ellen DeGeneres, who gives us a re-cycled Sixty Minutes story about how those Big Bad Corporations cut up government-owned horses for food, not to mention the natterings of Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame and her husband Brad Hall (who he?) about gay marriage that starts out unpromisingly:
“Look around and you’ll see the gays getting gay-married all over the place, and, to quote, well, everyone: gay marriage destroys real marriage. “
All over the place? Well, as my old Auntie Gay once told me: Just don’t scare the horses. Or it that just horse-sh*t?
Anywho, it’s onward and downward to Gerald Posner’s “exclusive” book excerpt about how the Saudis have their oil empire rigged to — yikes! — “self-destruct”:
“Based on National Security Agency electronic intercepts, the Saudi Arabian government has in place a nationwide, self-destruction explosive system composed of conventional explosives and dirty bombs strategically placed at the Kingdom’s key oil ports, pipelines, pumping stations, storage tanks, offshore platforms, and backup facilities. If activated, the bombs would destroy the infrastructure of the world’s largest oil supplier, and leave the country a contaminated nuclear wasteland ensuring that the Kingdom’s oil would be unusable to anyone. The NSA file is dubbed internally Petro SE, for petroleum scorched earth.”
Yes, the Saudis are primed to bomb themselves, and turn their country into a nuclear wasteland — but that’s only when holding their collective breath until they turn blue doesn’t work.
Puh-leeeze! Are we supposed to read this with a straight face? But perhaps this Gotterdammerung scenario is a metaphor for the fate of the Huffington Post itself. If it doesn’t succeed — that is, if the idea of Hollywood airheads (most of whom I confess to never having heard of) nattering on about nothing ad infinitum causes us all to go back to bed and pull the covers over our heads, as it ought to — rumor has it that Arianna’s head (which is already puffed up beyond human ken) is rigged to explode, along with the empty heads of her “columnists.”
Speaking of dirty bombs: the only columnist of any substance in this morning’s Huffington Post is David Frum, who berates Vladimir Putin for not building monuments to the evils of his own country and wallowing in guilt for the crimes of the Soviet era. The piece is aimed at the kind of airhead liberal who thinks that Putin is a Bad Guy because he’s roughing up those cute cuddlely Chechens, and seems never to smile. The Frum is mad because of “continued kid-gloving of Josef Stalin by senior leaders” — never mind that Stalin is long dead. Beating a dead horse is exactly what the neocons are all about — and what’s with the horse metaphor this morning? Is it because of all the horse-manure that seems to be clinging to our shoes as we traverse the highways and by-ways of the Internet this dreary Monday morn…..?
For a bracing antidode to Frum’s cold war rhetoric — we are supposed to believe that a broken-down country with a Third World economy and a declining population is “rapidly reverting to the authoritarian and expansionist past” (I think Frum is projecting here) — check out my column.
As for the verdict on Arianna’s much-heralded “blog” — back to the drawing board, dah-link!