The LA Weekly on the latest debacle of California’s clown princess:
Judging from today’s horrific debut of the humongously pre-hyped celebrity blog the Huffington Post, the Madonna of the mediapolitic world has gone one reinvention too many. She has now made an online ass of herself. What Arianna Huffington’s bizarre guru-cult association, 180-degree conservative-to-liberal conversion, and failed run in the California gubernatorial-recall race couldn’t accomplish, her blog has now done: She is finally played out publicly. This Web-site venture is the sort of failure that is simply unsurvivable, because of all the advance publicity touting its success as inevitable. Her blog is such a bomb that it’s the box-office equivalent of Gigli, Ishtar and Heaven’s Gate rolled into one. In magazine terms, it’s the disastrous clone of Tina Brown’s Talk, JFK Jr.’s George or Maer Roshan’s Radar. No matter what happens to Huffington, it’s clear Hollywood will suffer the consequences….
Still, the celebs aren’t to blame here, because they made the bad mistake of allowing Arianna to sweet-talk them into believing that they had something to say in the first place.
If one examines the writings that have survived from Rome and Athens, one seldom discovers anything worthwhile written by the charioteers, gladiators, thespians and Olympians who were the celebrities of their day. The hubristic optimism of our own celebrities in thinking that things would be any different now is more than a little amusing. I haven’t read the Huffer Puffer nor will I do so in the future, just as I’ve never listened to Air America. They’ll both be gone soon enough.