Say it ain't so, Tiger!

Doug Ross alerts us to this sad rumor from TMZ: Before his car accident, Tiger Woods argued with his wife about reports by the National Enquirer that Tiger had an affair with notorious floozy, Rachel Uchitel.

For the record, the floozy has denied the Enquirer story, but who can trust a floozy to tell the truth? More disturbing is the possibility that the golf champion took a mulligan on his wedding vows to Swedish beauty Elin Nordegren.

My advice to you, Tiger? Plead insanity. Because you'd have to be crazy to cheat on her.

Even though those nude photos turned out to be a hoax (we pride ourselves on careful research here), Elin's still a genuine Swedish super-model, not to mention the mother of your children.

The Rod Stewart Celebrity Cheating Rule applies here: If you're going to cheat on a Swedish super-model, it's got to be at least an equal exchange, and a notorious floozy is way below the acceptable exhange rate for Swedish super-models.

Stick with the insanity defense, Tiger. Your car accident? That was obviously a cry for help. This is a good time to reference one of the most inspirational scenes in American motion picture history:

Otter: I'll tell you what. We'll tell Fred you were doing a great job taking care of his car, but you parked it out back last night and in the morning, it was gone. We report it to the police, your brother's insurance company buys him a new car. D-Day takes care of the wreck.
Flounder: Will that work?
Otter: Hey, it's gotta work better than the truth.
Bluto: My advice to you is to start drinking heavily.
Otter: Better listen to him, Flounder, he's in pre-med.

Get well soon, Tiger! Meanwhile, we will continue to investigate rumors that people are doing Google searches for Rachel Uchitel photos. These reports can not yet be confirmed or denied, although if Rachel Uchitel topless or Rachel Uchitel sex video becomes available, we promise to keep our readers informed of the latest breaking developments.

UPDATE: David Frum laments that cable TV news doesn't talk about serious issues. As if the possibility of Tiger Woods cheating on sexy Elin Nordegren wasn't a serious issue. And as if cable TV news could survive without celebrity sex scandals.

Hey, Dave: We can't all be on the AEI payroll, OK? There's this thing called the "private sector," where we greedy capitalists have to figure out a way to pay for our wives' Black Friday shopping sprees.

Professor Donald Douglas ca n explain how this "capitalism" thing works. Supply, demand, yadda yadda.

UPDATE II: Dan Riehl knows the news value of this story. Dan's traffic was through the roof back during the Natalie Holloway heyday.

It is elitism to suppose that political news is the only news worth reporting. As a professional journalist, I've always appreciated the New York Post, which mixes real political reporting with garish celebrity tabloid news. Why does that work? Rule 5(B) explains it:

All politics all the time gets boring after a while. . . . Even a stone political junkie cannot subsist on a 24/7 diet of politics. The occasional joke, the occasional hot babe, the occasional joke about a hot babe -- it's a safety valve to make sure we don't become humorless right-wing clones of those Democratic Underground moonbats.

Relax and have fun.

UPDATE III: Professor Jacobson's speculation was right on target, and Carol at No Sheeples Here exposes the conspiracy against Tiger Woods.

UPDATE IV: Left Coast Rebel tries to cash in on the Google-bomb action. He raises an important question: Did the pressures of fame cause Tiger to stray? I doubt it. Tiger had been world-famous for several years when he married Elin in 2004.

A more likely scenario: The routine of marriage began to feel uncomfortably repetitive to the popular bachelor who had become accustomed to swinging his club freely on the world's finest courses. IYKWIMAITYD.

Tiger Woods certainly wouldn't be the first hubby who, after a few years of golfing the same par-4 over and over, couldn't resist an invitation to tee off on another fairway. At which point, Mrs. Woods decided to remind him of that "death do us part" vow by going upside his head with a 5 iron.

Let's hope this attitude adjustment had the desired effect. Remember, Tiger: She's got a kitchen full of knives, and you've got to sleep sometime.

Is Andrew Sullivan an anti-Semite?

I certainly don't think so, and consider it terribly unfortunate that Sullivan has exposed himself to this damaging accusation through his reflexive enthusiasm for all things Obama -- just as he once was denounced as a "neocon" because of his reflexive enthusiasm for all things Bush.

Sullivan got over his unrequited Dubya man-crush, and maybe his current see-no-evil attitude toward Israel's enemies will fade if Sullivan discovers that his new presidential idol also has feet of clay. So while I have called Sullivan a menace to society and advocated his deportation, he's probably not a Holocaust denier or a peddler of blood libel.

My friend Dan Riehl called attention to this accusation against Sullivan, by way of firing a shot at Conor Friedersdorf. I've fired my share of shots at Conor, but I certainly would never accuse him of Jew-hating. The extremely toxic nature of the "anti-Semite" label is such that I am extremely hesitant to apply it.

Consider the case of Taki Theodoracopulos, for example. Taki has been called an anti-Semite so often that some people accept the accusation at face value. But when National Review published David Frum's "Unpatriotic Conservatives" -- one of many ill-advised editorial decisions in the erratic career of Rich Lowry -- Taki responded in memorable fashion:

If this bum Frum thinks he's the only one who cannot see a belt without hitting below it, he's got another thing coming. . . . He is a cheap Canadian careerist who jumped on the neocon bandwagon and is now using anti-Semitism as a stick to beat us with. Mind you, to be called "unpatriotic" and an "anti-Semite" by this shameless publicity hound has to be a compliment.

Because Taki is independently wealthy, he has no need to fear that his career will be damaged by these accusations, and so he seldom even bothers to notice the charges and only rarely responds to them. This has, unfortunately, resulted in Taki's name being used -- as my own name has sometimes been used -- as a sort of Rosetta Stone that allows liberal mind-readers to decrypt the otherwise Secret Code Of Hate that allegedly unites the Right.

This business of liberals trying to tell conservatives who is "acceptable" has bothered me for years, and I don't like it any better when conservatives play the same game. Despite Frum's misguided centrist tendencies, for example, I have risked my populist street-cred by continuing to be his friend (unlike David Brooks, who is the Living Embodiment Of All Things Unholy.) If I can be Frum's friend, shall I allow him to say that Taki is "unacceptable"?

My own indirect connection with Taki has horrified some of my friends, though the explanation is innocent enough. A couple years ago, I was invited to speak about media bias in a panel discussion of the Duke lacrosse rape hoax, where Duke graduate student Richard Spencer was one of my fellow panelists. Spencer subsequently became editor of Taki's Magazine.

When I got an itch to write about "Melissa Beech," who boasted in a Daily Beast column about being a rich man's mistress, it seemed a good time to accept Spencer's longstanding invitation to publish at Taki's (whose proprietor is reputed to have had many mistresses). That first article led to my writing a series a columns about love, sex and marriage at Taki's, a series I hope to continue now that election season is over.

Did I fear the accusation that, by publishing at Taki's Magazine, I was thereby endorsing the alleged anti-Semitism of Taki or some of his magazine's other contributors? Of course not. My philo-Semitic bona fides are so impregnable that I rather suspect Taki and Spencer have caught more grief than I have: "How dare you publish that Jew-loving Zionist fanatic?"

My Zionist fanaticism -- Netanyahu is a pacifist squish by comparison -- once led me to advance a bit of strategic military advice for the IDF, a war-game scenario contingent upon the hypothetical event of my becoming the first Gentile prime minister of Israel.

You might suppose that a thought-experiment so farfetched would be immune to misinterpretation -- as fools often misinterpret hypotheticals -- as wishful thinking, but you would be wrong. Andrew Sullivan gave me a Malkin Award nomination (my third such honor, though I may have lost count) and Sully has subsequently accused me of advocating genocide of the Palestinians.

"Peace Through Genocide" might be profitably marketed as the title of a comic novel by Chris Buckley, or as one of those ironic T-shirt slogans beloved by clever university students, but it clearly has shortcomings as a serious policy proposal.

It should therefore be unnecessary for me to deny that I am advocate of Palestinian genocide but, alas, there is the problem of the irony-impaired Andrew Sullivan, who has spent 15 months fomenting bizarre speculations about Sarah Palin's uterus. To be accused of genocidal hatred by such a notorious fool is an accusation that requires no denial.

Having been slimed by Sully for the indulgence of a far-fetched hypothetical, let me take another wild risk:

If Conor Friedersdorf were a wealthy Greek shipping magnate, so that he could speak his mind without fear of career repercussion, what would he say about Jews?

Nothing bad, I hope, and so I gladly stipulate that Conor Friedersdorf is no more a Jew-hater than Taki.

Or Pat Buchanan. Or Joe Sobran. Or Paul Gottfried. IYKWIMAITYD. Nudge, nudge. Wink, wink.

UPDATE: Ann Altstein Altberg Althouse calls Sully a liar. Sarah Palin's Uterus agrees. Yehuda reveals that Palin's uterus is . . . the Mossad!

Reaganite Republican suspects the Learned Elders of Sullivanism have fomented this blog-war.