Christopher Hitchens wanted me to hold his willy! And other true stories!

Totally true. Now that the story is in print, I can tell it to the heavens. Excerpted:

“I must have a piss.” He surveyed the exiting crowd at the theater’s rear. Then he joined them, sending a shout in my direction. “Come on, then. You can hold it for me.”

“Okay,” I replied after a moment. “But my hands are on the cold side.”

“Ah! Well then, you can help me shake it.”

I was an innocent, bright-eyed journalism student out on assignment with Mr. Johnnie Walker Black-and-Iraq himself. He peed; we drank; I got kicked out of the Waverly Inn and crashed at his pad in Washington.

Get the why and how after the jump!

It was all for The New York Review of Magazines, the brainchild of a bunch of Columbia j-schoolers supervised by former Nation publisher/editor and nice old guy Victor Navasky. Other stories:

• Hillary Clinton abandons a Vogue cover photo shoot (and we photoshop her for our cover anyway);
  


• Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt defend sexy photo spreads as patriotic while they bag on Hef;
  


• A former intern recalls how Weekly Standard drank TNR's milkshake over a lying Iraq blogger;
  


• The Washington Monthly cuts corners and exploits child labor, but still can't stay afloat;
  


• And the rundown on which presidential campaigns Anna Wintour, Kate White, Martha Stewart, Laurel Touby, Larry Flynt and (the late) Bill Buckley doubled down on with cold cash money!

To close, here's an official message from my colleagues at the mag: "Link to us! Please! And give us jobs!"

Bush insider: We knew Iraq was screwed in 2005. Sorry.

I like Peter Feaver. He's a Navy man and political scientist who, along with Duke University colleague Christopher Gelpi, has undertaken the ivory tower's only serious study of civil-military affairs since the early '60s. (Full disclosure: I had collegial discussions with both men in 2005 and considered attending Duke to study with them. I went to journalism school instead.)

Dr. Feaver has another claim to fame: while serving on George W. Bush's National Security Council from 2005-2007, Feaver was outed as the Man Behind the Curtain, the architect of an Iraq "Plan for Victory" that Bush unveiled in a November '05 speech to the midshipmen of Annapolis (shown above; a captive audience, if there ever was one). Feaver's job was, as we former members of the Naval Academy's brigade sometimes say, to "polish the turd" that was Iraq, to put a happy face on a debacle that was quickly losing support.

So what's the problem? According to a new mea culpa by Feaver in Commentary, there never was a plan for victory - just a plan to forestall disaster until the next poor presidential mensch took over. Here's what he says now:

By the middle of 2005, it was painfully obvious to everyone involved that the only decisive outcome that could be achieved during President Bush’s tenure was the triumph of our enemies, America’s withdrawal, and Iraq’s descent into a hellish chaos as yet undreamed of. The challenge, therefore, was to develop and implement a workable strategy that could be handed over to Bush’s successor. Although important progress could be made on that strategy during Bush’s watch, ultimately it would be carried through by the next President.

Call me naive, but isn't this just a little devastating to hear from an administration official? To be fair, Feaver and his colleagues still saw "victory" as a possibility... but only in abstraction, on someone else's watch. Doesn't seem to square with some of the words he put in the president's mouth that evening by the Bay in Annapolis. He didn't tell the sea of future military officers they'd be marking time in the sand for the next three years. He didn't say victory was the next guy's concern. Instead, he said:

Against this adversary, there is only one effective response: We will never back down. We will never give in. And we will never accept anything less than complete victory. ...

... in the past year, Iraqi forces have made real progress. At this time last year, there were only a handful of Iraqi battalions ready for combat. Now, there are over 120 Iraqi Army and Police combat battalions in the fight against the terrorists... and they're helping to turn the tide of this struggle in freedom's favor. ...

As Iraqi forces increasingly take the lead in the fight against the terrorists, they're also taking control of more and more Iraqi territory. ...

We're also transferring forward operating bases to Iraqi control... From many of these bases, the Iraqi security forces are planning and executing operations against the terrorists -- and bringing security and pride to the Iraqi people. ...

The facts are that Iraqi units are growing more independent and more capable; they are defending their new democracy with courage and determination. They're in the fight today, and they will be in the fight for freedom tomorrow. (Applause.) ...

As the Iraqi security forces stand up, their confidence is growing and they are taking on tougher and more important missions on their own. As the Iraqi security forces stand up, the confidence of the Iraqi people is growing -- and Iraqis are providing the vital intelligence needed to track down the terrorists. And as the Iraqi security forces stand up, coalition forces can stand down -- and when our mission of defeating the terrorists in Iraq is complete, our troops will return home to a proud nation. (Applause.) ...

Some critics continue to assert that we have no plan in Iraq except to, "stay the course." If by "stay the course," they mean we will not allow the terrorists to break our will, they are right... Our strategy in Iraq is clear, our tactics are flexible and dynamic; we have changed them as conditions required and they are bringing us victory against a brutal enemy. (Applause.)

Sounds to me like LBJ, McNamara, Nixon and Kissinger redux: Pee on America's collective leg and tell the citizenry it's raining. Feaver and Gelpi's great contribution in civil-military affairs was the idea that the U.S. public isn't casualty-averse: Americans are willing to tolerate bloody wars as long as they see a worthy goal within sight. But in Feaver's experience, this notion compelled him to help manufacture hope in Middle America - "Have the president tell them we're turning a corner; it'll buy us some time."

We're still stuck in Iraq, and failure is still an option. Middle America rightly smelled trouble in 2005; some foreign-policy realists and counterinsurgency theorists smelled it much earlier. What Feaver should have learned is that you can't manufacture hope in the absence of evidence. If any chance for success and stability is to be had in Iraq - and I cling to the hope that it is - we should at least have a commander in chief who is sufficiently sanguine - and honest - about our prospects.

Jonesing for more Jones news: Holy crap! The song has words!

Gawker says the buzz on the upcoming non-indie Indy flick isn't all that hot, but it might all be part of a studio flack's conspiracy to bag on the movie for fun and profit.

More importantly, in a magnanimous nod to credulous, regressive children of the 80's like me, a Gawker commenter reveals that there are actually words to John Williams' famous Indiana Jones musical score. To wit:

Latest by Hez: Sing it with me now: In-di-ana fuck-ing Jones In-di-ana moth-er-fuck-ing Jones In-di-ana fuck-ing Jones Bite my ball-sack you Na-zis I'm In-di-ana fuck-ing Jones

It works! It really works! Not only that, but it works for Superman, too. My life is now complete, and yours should be, too.

Our new sweet, sweet place.

This is the Philly apartment building the missus and I will be moving to in June. It's in a neighborhood called Northern Liberties, a totally contrived moniker for what used to be the southern end of working-class Kensington. New-construction condos, yoga studios, tapas bars and art galleries abound. Along with robbers, vandals and rapists. It's like East Village, circa 1990, only with Obama posters everywhere! See more pictures here.

I forget: Which photo was the exploitive one again?

Well...

Gee...

If, by "exploitive," you mean dolling up a young, vulnerable girl to deliver viewers an idealized fantasy object, then... Hmm.

Hmm.

HMM.

No time for love, Dr. Jones!

Proof positive that God loves me and wants me to be happy.

Um. This is racist, right?

I was, uh, just checking.

Drop dead, Ira Glass, you smarmy bastard.

Have you seen these everywhere? On the streets, on the Web, in your nightmares, and everywhere else not yet plastered over by an Obama poster? You have, if you live in Manhattan... where apparently every subway- and bus-urchin is a latte-sipping, smarmy but guilty Ivy grad. (I, myself, eschew coffee and guilt.) We too-hip liberals sure love to commodify our quirky countercultural fetishes.

But hey, can I at least get on a g--damned bus without having some fawning iconography of my generation's Andy Rooney shoved down my gullet? Maybe I can write a radio spot about that. And draw it out over an hour. And shove David Sedaris in there with a bunch of Prius-driving Yalies to talk about how amazing "ordinary people" are.

You heard it here first: President John Edwards.

Oh, yeah. It can totally happen. I'm not even joking. Let all the bean-counting madmen at MSNBC wet themselves over the death struggle for Guam's 4 pledged delegates, while Huffington Post's grammar-stunted lovers of "hope" spill caramel macchiato on their keyboards and shake angry Obamite fists at Ms. Clinton. In the meantime, I'll lay some truth on you: also-ran John Edwards has just as good a chance as Bam or Hill of being the Dems' man in November, and judging by current events, that's probably what he's gunning for. How can I say such a thing? Find out after the jump.

Tuesday, the media stereoopticon tells us, is truth time for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. A convincing victory for either one in North Carolina would make a compelling case to the Dems' wishy-washy superdelegates that they have a consensus candidate.

The polls show Obama losing ground in a state where he once led comfortably by twenty points. He could seal this thing up with a double-digit win, but Clinton and the great majority of working-class whites living outside the Triangle have made that increasingly unlikely. For her part, Clinton could spin any victory as a Comeback Royale, an upset to rival Kansas' OT, come-from-behind win over Memphis in the Final Four, but I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

Both candidates need a shove over the North Carolina finish line. A shove that the state's golden-boy ex-senator, presumably, could provide. Except he hasn't. And he probably won't, not now.

Does John Edwards want influence? He's got it. The media are so sufficiently enraptured - and his constitutents are so sufficiently conflicted - that he could have easily played kingmaker with an endorsement of one or the other candidate... but it's too late now, too close to election day, for an Edwards announcement to make a full impact. Why would he miss such a glowing opportunity to maximize his party clout?

Because there's a better opportunity lying ahead. Absent another implosion by one of the candidates before Tuesday, we will have exactly what we had after Super Tuesday, and Ohio and Texas, and Pennsylvania: a hog-tie. Obama will win a meek victory in North Carolina - enough for him to claim he's the nominee, but not enough to shake off concerns that he's weak in the middle, where it could hurt him worse than Clinton in November.

Then Hill will clear the clutter off of the table - the West Virginias, the Puerto Ricos - and, come June, we'll be right where we are now. Both camps will claim they're more electable; both will lay claim to the delegate and popular-vote totals, even though those figures are so suspect they might as well be Olympic figure-skating scores.

At that point, the remaining superdelegates will do what Democratic Party insiders always do in these cases: poop themselves, cower in a corner, and wait for events to take care of themselves.

That will happen at the August party convention in Denver, where Obama and Clinton will go in as weak as ever. Neither will have the requisite 2,025 delegates, but they'll share one thing: approval ratings so low, they'd look like ants on the ground to Dennis Kucinich.

So there will be a convention ballot. And a deadlock. And then, something magical - and a little bit stupid - will happen: all bets will be off. Under arcane party rules, the delegates will be under no obligation to honor the wishes of party voters. Any candidate is up for consideration, and any vote is permissible. Hill and Bam will likely go to the bottom of the list.

Impossible, you say? The voters won't stand for it? Bullfeathers. The dueling duo's negatives are off the charts. Poll after poll has shown that, whether Obama or Clinton gets the nod, a huge swath of Democratic America will feel cheated - so cheated that we might spend the next 20 years marveling at a phenomenon called "McCain Democrats." If you're a superdelegate, and you know somebody in your party's gonna get screwed, you might as well throw out all pretenses to honoring "the will of the people" and look for the most electable guy in the room come November.

That guy, without question, will be Edwards. He acquitted himself admirably in the primaries. He has more slick oratorical lacquer then Obama (circa May 2008) and more middle-America cred than Clinton (circa whenever). Most importantly, he'll have stayed above the fray: a known quantity who kept it classy and didn't pick a bickering side while his counterparts tussled in the gutter, bruised each other, fatigued the public, and bankrupted their donors. Edwards is fresh but familiar, attractive to white and black, male and female, college-educated and non, latte and black coffee alike.

You think this scenario hasn't crossed his mind? Then explain Elizabeth Edwards' finger-wag job on the media - and by extension, the people - for their electoral fickleness last week. And the pair's subtle knack for peppering Obama and Clinton with underhanded compliments ever since the real primary blooding started. The Edwardses have done just enough to stay engaged and credible without stepping in it.

And come August, their aloofness may be just the accent Howard Dean needs to throw over the deck chairs on this sinking ship disguised as a major political party.

Then, there will only be one more tough question: Who does Edwards pick for a veep?

(Suggestions are welcome!)