Hillary scores:

Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., said today that Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, made comments that were “irresponsible and frankly naive” when he said in Monday night’s debate that he would meet with leaders of rogue nations during his first year in office.

Clinton’s response, made in an interview with an Iowa newspaper, marks the sharpest exchange to date between the top two Democratic candidates for president — and the first time Clinton has explicitly attacked another Democratic candidate.

She lost no time at all.

You didn’t hear them from me. You heard them from Andrew Franklin:

One of the first things every editor is taught is that the rejection letter should be final, that is, it should not give any opportunity for a response. When you return the manuscript you never want to have to think about it again. So it is fatal to suggest that, for example, the plot is quite good but needs work in the closing chapters, or that there are too many characters, or that the dialogue needs work. Send these suggestions to the writer you don’t want and you are entering the long-term relationship from hell, because in three weeks the manuscript will come straight back at you with the changes you have recommended. So publishers use euphemistic - all right, let’s be honest, weaselly - phrases when rejecting manuscripts, like “not quite right for our list” or “would not fit our publishing programme”. The clear subtext is that the manuscript is unpublishable and the writer should consign it to their bottom drawer. For ever.

Andrew Franklin is British. He lives in England. That’s across the Pond, so not to worry—surely things are different over here, eh?

However, Franklin’s revelations are as nothing compared to the weirdly entrancing and supremely self-serving imagined “revelations” of one John Barnes about the real identity of TNR’s mystery writer “Scott Thomas,” who made the U.S. military look so bad:

I think I have a pretty good guess as to who “Scott Thomas” is – not his identity but what sort of person the Thomas-hunters should be looking for — based mainly on looking at his writing and at the social context of The New Republic from my unique perspective. I seriously doubt there is another consulting semiotician who is also a book doctor and part-time agency reader, and doubt even further that there is another one who has  read “Thomas’s” New Republic piece.

Credentials firmly established, Barnes goes on to speculate about the type of person who might have written the piece:

He (it is always a he) is an MFA candidate or recent graduate at one of the big-name creative writing programs in the USA, sometimes in poetry, usually in fiction, and increasingly in “creative non-fiction” (the litsy byline that “feature writing” took on when it moved uptown, became significant, and stopped having lunch with its old buds at the newspapers).  Usually he is in his mid-twenties and is probably among the bright stars in the tiny constellation (and complicated pecking order) that MFA programs create.  His particular niche in that social ecology will be the Big Talent With Big Balls, a role that requires some claim to a “dangerous” or “edgy” past, meaning some connection to interpersonal violence and to having seen some gruesome sights.  (Being recently back from combat duty in Iraq, particularly if the young man is a reservist who will be going back for another hitch there, would certainly fit the bill nicely – at various times I have known such characters to claim to be motorcycle gang members, to have smuggled cocaine into the US in small boats, and to have competed as Ultimate Fighting professionals).

Sounds like someone has been reading way too many manuscripts from the slush pile.

Paula Zahn is gone.

The unraveling of “Paula Zahn Now,” which made its debut at 8 p.m. in 2003, was ultimately a function of ratings.

Ya think? You mean America doesn’t Idolize a sharp-tongued blonde with a grating manner?

The terminally naive former nun Karen Armstrong, hailed after 9/11 as an expert on Islam and loved by the opinion elite for her counsel to turn the other cheek (which seems to be the one-size-fits-all recommendation of uber-Christians like Armstrong and that Carter fella to Westerners confronted by barbaric violence masquerading as Islam) is at it again. The headline for her latest opinion piece in the Guardian reads as follows:

An inability to tolerate Islam contradicts western values

Armstrong, addressing the thorny issue of freedom of expression, claims that it is “sacred” to the West:

In the west, however, liberty of expression proved essential to the economy; it has become a sacred value in our secular world, regarded as so precious and crucial to our identity that it is non-negotiable. Modern society could not function without independent and innovative thought, which has come to symbolise the inviolable sanctity of the individual.

Then comes the inevitable but. But. But. But.

[Freedom of expression] has also, as we have been reminded recently, become a rallying cry in the escalating tension between the Islamic world and the west. Muslim protests against Rushdie’s knighthood have recalled the painful controversy of The Satanic Verses, and last week four British Muslims were sentenced to a total of 22 years in prison for inciting hatred while demonstrating against the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad.

Armstrong claims that Muslims polled in ten countries admire our freedoms. So why, when confronted with Western freedom of expression that offends their sensibilities, are we treated to the fatwas, the hysteria, the rioting, and the exhortations to behead infidels who would dare to criticize what Muslims hold dear?

In the past Islamic governments were as prone to intellectual coercion as any pre-modern rulers, but when Muslims were powerful and felt confident they were able to take criticism in their stride. But media and literary assaults have become more problematic at a time of extreme political vulnerability in the Islamic world, and to an alienated minority they seem inseparable from Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and the unfolding tragedy of Iraq.

[e.a.]

In this formulation, the powerful West (all of it, including the editorial board of a Danish newspaper) should take the insecurity of Muslims (all 1.4 billion of them) into account before daring to criticize or offend them.

This is appropriately kind-hearted and “nice” and therefore politically correct. But it’s wrongheaded, and anti-democratic.

It is the unwillingness to name names, to criticize everyone equally—including those who perceive themselves to be weak—that contradicts Western values. Because it accords special (and condescending) rights to minorities at the sacrifice of the freedoms of the majority.

Freedom of speech for thee and for me.