The ten-year anniversary of Diana’s death is coming up, so I guess it’s time for the British media to tear down her rival:

A documentary depicting the Duchess of Cornwall as a ‘woman of easy virtue’ whose lost virginity prevented her marrying Prince Charles in her youth is to be shown by Channel 4.

The salacious discussion of Camilla’s unsuitability to marry the heir to the throne will be shown tomorrow night.

Channel 4 has already faced a public outcry over plans to broadcast a photograph of Princess Diana dying in her mangled car as part of another documentary next week.

Insensitive revelations about the woman Prince Charles finally married in Windsor two years ago will doubtless be viewed with distaste by members of the Royal Family.

Doubtless.

Older readers will of course remember that Prince Charles not so long ago told Camilla that he wanted to “live inside her trousers,” perhaps as a tampon.

In an interview, Andrew Breitbart describes the real impact of the digital revolution:

The Internet has created raw immediacy and raw connectedness to anything and everything.

It seems that if you’ve ever felt constrained by the bureaucracies of the world — whether it be government or corporations — it seems that now any individual can do anything that they set their mind to. A person can create a Web site that looks as if it’s a multinational corporation. You can go to GM.com or you can go to MG’s blog, and MG’s blog is 10 times more compelling. You can pretty much do anything. You can start your own T-shirt company, you can cultivate an audience, you can create a business from scratch. ….

Yep. It’s pretty goddamn cool. Not to mention that it’s a bonanza for us news junkies who’ve got something to say:

I’m a news addict, news aficionado …

The idea now, on the Internet, that I can read everything that’s being read inside the major newsrooms in the country — I’d pay top dollar for that, back in the day. And now it’s all there.

You know that you’re seeing the same exact information that the Dan Rathers, the Peter Jennings, the Tom Brokaws of the world are seeing. You’re like, “Wait a second. Why did you choose that to be the No. 1 story?” And you start gaining a level of confidence that there’s a conventional wisdom out there, set by people with a very parochial sensibility.

Given that anything’s possible on the Internet, you kind of feel motivated to say, “Let me have my say on this. Let me try and counteract the effect of there being a machinery that creates conventional wisdom without taking into consideration alternative viewpoints.” …

That pretty much describes my experience, and the long, long road I’ve traveled on the Internet, of which I’ve been an officianado aficionado since 1993, when I signed up for my first Pipeline (a local NYC ISP) account, up until today, when I mark sixteen months as a blogger (averaging four link-and content-rich posts a day).

Once, in response to a post by Jeff Jarvis on the topic of who we bloggers are, I left the following comment:

We are longtime thinkers and readers and writers who went to the same schools as MSMers (No insult intended. Some of my best friends are MSMers.) but decided to pursue careers and professions other than journalism. We make our living doing other things, but we continue to read and to be engaged by the dynamic world around us and by the world of ideas. We like to read. We like to write. We like to make fun of what we observe in public life, like in MST3K. We like to debate. We understand rhetoric. We know how to check facts and sources.

It’s not journalism, though–few of us are out there bearing witness or interviewing people or acquiring other primary-source material (although with the advent of podcasting and various blogging consortia, that may be changing).

It’s…I dunno. Maybe blogging is “opinion reporting.”

We’re different from journalists, because we seek to mix it up with our readers. We’re looking for conversation and debate. We want to be involved in the intellectual/cultural life of our country (such as it is). Some of us are tired of shouting back at the talking heads on TV and NPR and at editorial writers and columnists. We have areas of expertise and opinions, too.

The blogosphere is where thinking people go to debate the politics of the day, the ideas of public intellectuals, and the opinions of paid opinion writers. It’s where the national conversation is taking place. Be there or be square.

Here’s more from that inspiring Breitbart interview:

Q: You create your own news wire.

A: There are people who can go out there and become a creme brulee blog and obsess on creme brulee and have strong opinions on creme brulee, and which is the best type of creme brulee. They can fight against the creme caramelle people who don’t have the hardened sugar top. And eventually, people who like creme brulee will migrate to this place and that person will become the creme brulee spokesperson. And then maybe a dessert company finds this person, says, “You know more about this than our president does,” and hire them for $75,000 a year.

It seems that there’s been, across the board, a democratizing of everything. It seems that the American spirit of freedom is being exported. In a MacLuhanesque way, the medium is the message. The freedoms that we see online in this country — there’s no taxation of it — all these things have all benefitted from the growth of the Internet.

It’s very difficult to sell to totalitarianism in the Internet age. Do you want a free Internet? Do you want absolute control of your Internet life, or do you want to put that in the control of others? And I think that if people were to start taking away your freedoms online, you’d see a bloody revolution.

Q: People would fight for their online freedom.

A: Right. To many people, it’s everything. I think people take it for granted. I think people should be jumping up on top of their beds, thanking God every single day that this thing was invented.

Well, I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s pretty goddamn cool. And it’s definitely liberating.

Spencer Ackerman, back from being embedded in Iraq, has some words of wisdom for the Democrats:

The uncomfortable reality is this: nothing in Iraq worth fighting for remains achievable, and nothing achievable in Iraq remains worth fighting for [I respectfully disagree: political freedom is always worth fighting for. --ed.] Democrats have made the decision—rightly, I think—that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of many bad options. But they shouldn’t kid themselves into thinking that a majority of the troops doing the fighting agree with them. For soldiers like Lieutenant Wellman, this will be hard to accept. As he told me of war doubters back home, “I don’t want them to just support the troops. I want them to support the mission.” This matters, because pretending that in ending the war they’re doing the troops a favor hurts Democrats politically. They risk looking condescending, and, worse, oblivious—which has the broader effect of undermining public trust in the Democrats to handle national security. …

Democrats would do much better to speak honestly: to acknowledge that many fighting men and women want to stay in the battle and would be willing to do so for years longer. There’s nothing wrong with saying that, nor in emphasizing that this is part of what makes us so proud of our military. We wouldn’t want soldiers who were unwilling to fight to the bitter end.

The Dems won’t listen, because their base clearly isn’t proud of our military. The military doesn’t do dialogue, you see. It kills people (more than 650,000 Iraqis along, according to the ignorant but representative rabidly partisan Democrat Rosie O’Donnell). It trashes things, usually irreparably.

The American military, according to that point of view, is the problem. That’s how fucked-up the Democratic base is and has been ever since Vietnam. And my gloomy prediction is that the Dems will go down in 2008, and in every election thereafter, until they can show, rather than just say, that they support the troops.

Kudos to Ackerman (one exception to the under-30-know-nothings category) for trying, though.

p.s. on my queue: a bloggingheads.tv diavlog between Ackerman and Eli Lake.

Glenn Greenwald:

What Olbermann actually is, first and foremost, is a critic of the government who adopts an aggressively adversarial posture towards the President and those in power. That actually is — or at least used to be — called “journalism.”

“Hepzeeba Smith”:

Really?

 Before there were bloggers, there were … enthusiasts:

I don’t think there’s a good word for what Mr. Hall did: “researcher” is too dry, “historical investigator” carries hints of melodrama, and “archivist” suggests a dutiful drudge, which Mr. Hall was not. “Amateur historian” probably fits best, though it sounds vaguely derivative and second-tier. Following a career with the Labor Department–he retired in the early 1970s–Mr. Hall turned himself into the world’s foremost authority on the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Historians, pros and amateurs alike, sought him out for his knowledge and access to his exhaustive files. As one of them put it, James O. Hall knew more about Lincoln’s murder than anyone who ever lived, including John Wilkes Booth.

How is it that the extremely busy columnist, author, and television commentator David Brooks

can find the time not only to inject new ideas into the bloodstream of the great national debate (okay: it’s actually the culture war circus) but also to read and coherently critique entire books by his ideological opponents

[H]ey, nobody ever died from contact with pomposity, and Al Gore’s “The Assault on Reason” is well worth reading. It reminds us that whatever the effects of our homogenizing mass culture, it is still possible for exceedingly strange individuals to rise to the top.

Gore is, for example, a radical technological determinist. While most politicians react to people, Gore reacts to machines, and in this book he lays out a theory of history entirely driven by them.

but that a whippersnapper blogger like Matthew Yglesias is too bored *** to engage serious, knowledgeable critics like Noah Pollak on substantive issues

Peretz clearly has the better understanding of Gaza, and the better argument. But he became annoyed, told Yglesias to shove off, and let the ignorant party come away appearing more reasonable. That’s too bad, because Yglesias’ writings on the Middle East, I’m afraid to say, have a distinctively hanging-out-at-the-coffee-shop feel to them. Yglesias believes that “Hamas-Fatah violence is largely the result of deliberate American policy.” If Peretz won’t have a go at this argument, I will.

and entirely dismissive of the ideas (which he won’t even read)+++ of certain public intellectuals in favor of the ideas of other public intellectuals whom he’s more inclined to trust … well, just because (i.e., for unstated reasons)?

I have no real intention of reading a 28,000 word Paul Berman essay on why Tariq Ramadan is bad in The New Republic, so I’ll refrain from commenting on the substance of things. I will note that Ian Buruma’s Iong New York Times Magazine article on Ramadan reached very different conclusions and I’m more likely to take Buruma’s word for it than Berman’s.  

The last time Yglesias chose certain smart people over certain other smart people to take at their word, of course, he ended up supporting the Iraq war. Under the circumstances, I’d be more wary both of trusting my own instincts and of laying out the politically correct stance on issues for others. But then I’m not under 30.

———–

*** and intellectually dishonest: Yglesias pretended that the entire “dust-up,” rather than being a fierce debate about the reason for the horrifically violent fighting between Hamas and Fatah, was a mere ”feud” between him and Marty Peretz and that Jonah Goldberg had “piled on”:

I was going to just ignore New Republic editor in chief Martin Peretz’s efforts to bait me, but when Jonah Goldberg piled on it was just too much intellectual firepower to stay out of the fray. Now, seriously, what Brian Beutler said. And what Brian Ulrich said. I’m done with this feud as there’s really no point in arguing with someone who’s proud of his role in bringing Charles Krauthammer into the national conversation.

+++ at least not all the way through: Yglesias later tackled the Berman piece, in a manner of speaking. He used his second post to attack Ayaan Hirsi Ali.

Nora Ephron, writing about the Rosie vs. Elizabeth blowout, which Barbara Walters is desperately trying to spin, inadvertently describes ”cocooning” *** better than anybody:

Elizabeth [Hasselbeck, of The View] was the only person I knew who was in favor of the war.

The thing Ephron’s ashamed of is not the pathetically rigid political orthodoxy that excludes from her (presumably wide) social circle anyone who might disagree with her vaguely held views (re “in favor of the war”: which war?—we’re fighting more than one; also, in favor of ”the war” at which point in time?) but her neck.

Have the plastic surgery already! Maybe it’ll make room for a little tolerance and diversity in your clever pinhead.

————-

*** It has only gotten worse since Mickey Kaus wrote about the phenomenon in October 2003.

Even Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, ahem, members do it—near Yasser Arafat’s grave:

According to Israeli security officials and Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades sources in Ramallah, Shawish was arrested after the Israeli police stormed his jeep, which was parked in a lot outside the Muqata, about 200 feet from Arafat’s grave. The sources said at the time of his arrest, Shawish was having intercourse in the back seat of his jeep with a Palestinian woman, whose identity is being withheld by WND. The woman was not his wife.

The Brigades, founded by Arafat, largely considers the late PLO leader’s resting place to be a sacred site.

Indeed!