THE TENSION: The Decline and Fall of Western Civ. for 29 Aug

Tonight's DFWC surfs the waves of Katrina, lights a Plame and drives a Karr off a cliff.

Hot Air has posted a video of CNN’s Kyra Phillips caught with her skirt down. According to Hot Air, someone in CNN left Phillip's mic open and on the air as she went to the loo in the middle of President Bush’s speech commemorating the Katrina anniversary. So instead of getting the president’s remarks, CNN’s audience got that and Phillips in some girl-chat.

The newssphere is groaning about the utter fiasco that was Plamegate. Here we have the only time the legacy media cares anything about an "outed" CIA agent, and it's all in an effort to smear the president. Read `em and weep: Christopher Hitchens in Slate, Byron York in NRO, Dennis Sevakis in The American Thinker, Michael Isikoff's original story in Newsweek, and the Washington Post. The crime committed here was in knowing that Armitage was the leaker but remaining silent all the while.

AP reported on 22 Aug that former CIA officer Valerie Plame is considering suing the recent No. 2 State Department official in a case accusing members of the Bush administration of conspiring to leak her identity to the media, Plame's attorney said last Tuesday. I guess in AP's disappointment, they simply don't want to report anything about the recent developments.

The newssphere waded in soggy memories of Hurricane Katrina, which hit the Gulf Coast a year ago today. Having lived through Katrina on the Gulf Coast last year, I am here to tell you, if you WANT to remember Hurricane Katrina, you probably WEREN'T there. I was there. I chose to leave after the storm. Everyone has a choice. Some chose to whine, some chose to blame, some chose to get on with life. I choose not to remember Hurricane Katrina. Washington Post, AP, more Washington Post, CNN, Reuters.

Looking for more than his 15 minutes of fame on American TV, Iran's President Ahmadinejad challenges Bush to TV debate and voiced defiance as a deadline neared for Iran to halt work the West fears is a step toward building nuclear bombs, reports Reuters. Oft quoted on my blog, I repeat once again for your inspection the following words of wisdom: "An extremist with a microphone can be dangerous enough; an extremist with nuclear weapons poses a danger to the entire world." --David Saperstein

C.W. Nevius, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle says, "It's time to put the videos of dancing JonBenet away." However, the real crime committed here was one perpetrated by the media in the way of a feeding frenzy. Allison Stewart of MSNBC had the blind audacity to say on-air, "How come he's not being charged with something like obstruction or making false statements or conspiracy to trigger a media frenzy at the very least?" Between Plamegate and the Karr accident, the fact that some folks in the media aren't being frog-marched out the door is beyond me.