Quick Hits – a ‘new republic’ or the same old shit?

Prime Choice – TNR suggests that Al Gore is the Democrats' best bet to take back the White House in 2008. I realize that The New Republic is liberal in the Lieberman sense of the word, but when exactly did it become a shill for the GOP? Seriously, the only thing that would give Karl Rove a bigger hard on than a Gore nomination (and by "bigger" I mean 4 inches instead of 3 ½) would be a Gore-Hillary ticket.

Trash Talk: Why Ann Coulter really is the most hated woman in America – didn't we answer this already? (hint, Pig Latinos call her untkay)

Tony Award – billed as "How one of the Iraq war's most tragic figures got it right", the piece should really have been described as "Tony Blair really isn't Bush's whipping boy – I promise". Really? Let's take a look:

Blair…is articulating a coherent, desperately needed vision for the post-cold-war, post-September 11 world. It is a vision deeply rooted in the liberal tradition--and fundamentally different from that of George W. Bush.

…From America's preaching about human rights while it operates Guantánamo Bay to its demand for tougher nonproliferation rules while it builds a whole new class of nukes (not for deterrence but for potential battlefield use)--this is the basic contradiction at the heart of Bush's foreign policy. And Blair, as gently as he can, has been pointing it out. "There is a hopeless mismatch," he declared last month at Georgetown University, "between the global challenges we face and the global institutions to confront them. After the Second World War, people realized that there needed to be a new international institutional architecture. In this new era, in the early twenty-first century, we need to renew it."

To build that new architecture, Blair proposed empowering the U.N. secretary-general to respond rapidly to emerging humanitarian crises, before the next Bosnia or Darfur spins out of control. He proposed revamping the Security Council to include India, Germany, and Japan--so it better reflects the power realities of today. He urged fundamental reform of the International Monetary Fund. He proposed an international uranium bank that makes peaceful nuclear power easier and nuclear proliferation harder. And he called for a powerful U.N. environmental organization to coordinate dramatic action on global warming.

And then Blair turned the knife. "What's the obstacle" to such efforts, he asked? "It is that, in creating more effective multilateral institutions, individual nations yield up some of their own independence. This is a hard thing to swallow.... But the [alternative is] ... ad hoc coalitions for action that stir massive controversy about legitimacy or paralysis in the face of crisis. No amount of institutional change will ever work unless the most powerful make it work."

That line about illegitimate "ad hoc coalitions": that's Iraq. "Paralysis in the face of crisis": Darfur. And the "most powerful" without whom such efforts will never work: He's talking about the USA.

Hmm…does this mean Blair needs to come off the list? And why the hell was a 5-paragraph, 350-word passage included in a post named "Quick Hits"? Like the number of licks it takes to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop, I'm afraid the world may never know.