According to the eccentric New York Sun, Britain and France are duking it out over who’s going to be America’s bestest friend:

Not to be outdone by President Sarkozy’s amorous overture to President Bush in Washington, Prime Minister Brown of Britain has used the first major foreign policy speech of his premiership to insist that Britain is America’s closest ally.

After decades of Anglo-French rivalry, in which France has vehemently deplored the global influence America and Britain have attained and what every president of France since Charles de Gaulle has described as “Anglo-Saxon culture,” Mr. Sarkozy claimed during his visit to Washington last week that France, not Britain, is now America’s best friend and partner.

Mr. Brown, who has been portrayed on both sides of the Atlantic as having distanced himself from America to avoid the charge against his predecessor, Tony Blair, that he was Mr. Bush’s “poodle,” fought back last night, claiming in a speech at a banquet thrown by the lord mayor of the city of London that the French president’s bid to usurp Britain’s traditional place alongside America would not succeed.

They love us—they really, really love us!

Not much these days if your name is The Atlantic. Ankush Khardori unloads on the magazine, and on Andrew Sullivan:

The Atlantic needs to consider whether it’s appropriate for someone with such a visceral, irrational hatred of a candidate to be spewing his nonsense all over their website, let alone in the pages of the magazine. In the Obama piece, Sullivan writes of Hillary Clinton — with no support whatsoever — that she is “primarily interested in winning power,” that she “exhibit[s] plasticness and inauthenticity,” that she “smell[s] . . . of political fear,” and that a speech on her faith is “repellent” because it was done “tackily.” This is dialed down compared to the vitriol that Sullivan displays on his blog, but his hatred — and I choose that word carefully — of Clinton is bound up with all of his views on the Democratic race, including his views of Barack Obama.

He also notes Sullivan’s true professional skill:

it’s impressive how Sullivan has parlayed his over-excitedness into a career.

That has been obvious from miles away, for a long time. The truly interesting question is what he will do when the next regime gets to town. He’s got a lot riding on Obama, and a whole lot to lose if Hillary ascends the presidential throne (a calculation that many others inside the Beltway are also contending with).

Kaus also took a shot at The Atlantic, for a bizarre zoo-like party it threw to honor those it deemed worthy … while the hoi polloi watched:

The Atlantic Discovers the American Idea: Kudos to gravy-trainish Atlantic chairman David Bradley for giving an anniversary party so elementally, gracelessly snooty that it transcended its disastrousness to become a powerful parable of social equality!

It’s all about branding, of course. The media institutions that once claimed to serve the public interest have been exposed as the bare-knuckled businesses they are.

As for the embarrassing hysteria of Sullivan and the smirking intellectual dishonesty of Yglesias, for them it’s all about fame, baby, not character—or honor ***:

Remember me? (”Step in, execution”)
Remember me? (”I have no remorse”)
Remember me? (”I’m ‘High Powered’”)
Remember me? (”I drop bombs like Hiroshima”)

… I grab the mic and get DOWN, like Syndrome
Hide and roam into the masses, without boundaries
which qualifies me for the term “universal”
Without no rehearsal, I leak words that’s controversial
Like I’m not, the one you wanna contest, see
cause I’ll hit yo’ ass like the train did that bitch
that got “Banned From TV” — heavyweight hitter
Hit you watch your whole head split up
Loco-is-the-motion, we comin through
Hollow tips is the lead, the .45 threw

—Eminem, “Remember Me”

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*** In today’s New York Times, David Brooks, writing about John McCain, draws the distinction:

he is driven by an ancient sense of honorm which is different from fame and consists of the desire to be worthy of the esteem of posterity.