[Update: The marine who "waterboarded" Mancow told us this morning that he had "no idea what he was doing" and that everything he knows about waterboarding, he read on the internet. Mancow told us that "hoax isn't the right word," but that the whole thing was supposed to be "simulated."]

The information provided to Gawker by our tipster came in a series of emails and is somewhat layered, so we'll try to lay it all out as unconfusingly as possible. Where the story begins is last Thursday afternoon, the day before Mancow was scheduled to be waterboarded, when the person slated to do the waterboarding suddenly backed out, sending Mancow's publicity team into a mild frenzy to find someone to replace him. A chain of emails followed, emails that were subsequently forwarded to Gawker by our tipster.

There are three main players in the following sequence of events:

-The first is a Chicago-based publicist named Linda Shafran whose clients include the Jerry Springer and Steve Wilkos shows, in addition to Erich "Mancow" Muller. In describing Shafran our tipster added:

"Linda Shafran is Springer's current publicist until the show starts shooting in CT. Since Springer is her primary source of income, she's now trying to help promote Mancow nationally as a shock jock alternative to Howard Stern."

-The second person involved in this is a man named David Kupcinet. He runs a Chicago-based foundation for veterans called Kup's Purple Heart Foundation. He is the grandson of Irv Kupcinet, a somewhat legendary Chicago gossip columnist who wrote a column for the Chicago Sun Times for over 60 years. At the behest of a friend, Linda Shafran contacted Kupcinet on Thursday hoping that his relationships with Chicago-area veterans and military personnel could help her find a replacement waterboarder.

-The third person involved here, to a much lesser degree, is another Chicago-based publicist named Kathy Posner. According to our tipster, Posner is Jerry Springer's former flack and a friend of both Linda Shafran and Erich "Mancow" Muller. According to one of the emails we were forwarded, it was Posner who suggested that Shafran contact David Kupcinet to find a replacement waterboarder.

Now, with all of that background established, here are some of the emails that followed between Shafran and Kupcinet, the first being the initial contact between the two on the matter:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:15 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: URGENT

Don't shoot the messenger

Mancow has been promoting all week that he is getting waterboarded tomorrow between 8-9am on-air. We have camera crew shooting it for WGN

The swat guy he had to do the waterboarding now can't do it. Do you know any military guy that might come down to WLS radio tomorrow (190 N. State Street) to waterboard Mancow????

Kathy said you know lots of military guys that might do it...or a policeman or fireman or EMT.

HELP

Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
cell: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

Kupcinet, or "Kuppy," responded a few minutes later:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:28 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: Re: URGENT

What exactly do you mean? You mean really tortured? What exactly would it consist of and do they need to bring gear or does Cow have what he needs or what?

Get back to me quick an ill find u a guy.

Kuppy

(P.S. Love you)

Sent from my iPhone

Now, here's the key email in the exchange, with Shafran saying in no uncertain terms that the whole thing is being staged as a hoax:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 1:38 PM
To: [redacted]
Cc: [redacted]
Subject: Re: URGENT

You are a ROCK STAR!!!

It is going to have to look "real" but of course would be simulated with Mancow acting like he is drowning. It will be a hoax but have to look real. Would be great if they could dress in fatigues and bring whatever is needed. We will supply the water

xxxx

Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
cell: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

After getting this email from Shafran, David Kupcinet suggested she contact Marine Sgt. Clay South, the person who eventually carried out Mancow's waterboarding. We include this next email only because we find the compensation offer extended to South from Mancow via Shafran to be somewhat amusing:

From: [redacted]
Date: Thu, May 21, 2009 at 2:02 PM
To: [redacted]
Subject: MANCOW WAS ALL OVER IT

I tried to call you but got voicemail. I talked to Mancow and he said "Are you kidding - of course he can mention the charity and talk about his experiences over there"

I am going to call Klay now. Mancow will pay gas and parking.

Linda Shafran
Jerry Springer Show
454 N. Columbus Dr.
Chicago, IL 60611
PH: [redacted]
FX: [redacted]
Email: [redacted]

We contacted Linda Shafran last night for a statement about this and she emailed us back with an emphatic denial that anything was faked:

It was NOT a hoax. Early on when we were looking for someone to waterboard, an email was sent out looking for someone to do it and I mistakenly said it would be staged. That was my mistake and a misunderstanding.

But that was early and NOT TRUE AT ALL. It was not staged. NOT AT ALL. When it happened several days later, it was real, honest, actual, not staged.

Any info you have was my mistake. THE WATERBOARDING OF MANCOW WAS REAL!!!!!!

The glaring discrepancy in Shafran's statement to us is that her emails to Kupcinet are dated Thursday, May 21st, the day prior to Mancow's waterboarding, while she now claims that these emails were sent out "early on" and that the waterboarding took place "several days later." Additionally, she even mentions that Mancow "is getting waterboarded tomorrow" in her first note to Kupcinet.

Regarding the emails between Safran and Kupcinet, our tipster also informed us that they were shared with Keith Olbermann's producers prior to Mancow's appearance on his show. We were told that they were beyond livid when they found out about them and expressed their extreme displeasure for the whole situation with Linda Shafran over the phone, but went ahead with the planned segment anyway, making no mention of the fact that they'd received advance word that the whole thing may have been staged. However, we were unable to confirm this with anyone at MSNBC.

Now, we're obviously no experts on the art of waterboarding, but we've done a bit of research on it and also went back and watched the video of Christopher Hitchens' waterboarding in 2008 to compare and contrast his waterboarding against Mancow's, and we couldn't help but notice some rather striking differences.

In the Hitchens video, everything is carried out pretty much according to universal waterboarding protocol as we've come to understand it. His limbs and torso are tightly bound by restraints. The platform on which he lays appears to be tilted slightly downward so that his head is positioned below his heart. His head is also completely covered and the water used looks as though it's poured directly into his breathing passages.

In contrast, Mancow isn't bound by restraints at all, he doesn't appear to have his body positioned at a decline, only a portion of his face from the nose up is covered, and the water is being poured on him inappropriately.

In short, when we watched the Mancow video for the first time it struck us in a "well that doesn't look TOO awful" sort of way. For a brief moment it even made us want to call some friends over so we could all waterboard each other and see what all the fuss is about. On the other hand, the Hitchens video is somewhat nightmarish, making us want to never have anything to do with a waterboarding, ever.

We suggest you watch them both and decide for yourself.

See, DC gets one big party, every year, at the WHCA dinner. It is like their Oscars and Fashion Week and SxSW and Spring Break combined, except with fewer celebrities, and the celebrities that do show are usually about 10 years past their prime, and also the event itself and 90% of the associated parties really suck, instead of just mostly sucking.

So for years the most important part of the event was the Bloomberg afterparty, the most coveted ticket in town. They hold these parties are embassies and there is an open bar and some models imported from New York and, you know, Hank Kissinger and Adam Nagourney and all the other superstars of DC are there, getting drunk.

But meanwhile, at Chris Hitchens' house, a smaller, more intimate, cooler party is secretly going on! This one has Paul Wolfowitz and Ana Marie Cox and Christiane Amanpour and Dee Dee Myers! And the chances of a drunken writerly brawl are a bit better there than at Bloomberg, it has to be said.

But this year, Vanity Fair decided to team up with Bloomberg to throw a party at the home of the French Ambassador, who apparently lives right down the street from Hitch. This means VF's party will be bigger and less exclusive and Bloomberg's party will be smaller and less extravagant. Lose-lose! God damn this Obama recession, ruining everything.

Don't get us wrong! It's cool enough. It helps a bit with the "drunken radical leftist provocateur" cred that Hitch has lost as he's aged and supported the dumbest president ever. He's gallivanting along one of Beirut's most chic street, shopping for the missus, he claims, when he comes across a swastika, which he promptly begins to deface, until he is set upon by thugs!

I have barely gotten to the letter k in a well-known transitive verb when I am grabbed by my shirt collar by a venomous little thug, his face glittering with hysterical malice. With his other hand, he is speed-dialing for backup on his cell phone. As always with episodes of violence, things seem to slow down and quicken up at the same time: the eruption of mayhem in broad daylight happening with the speed of lightning yet somehow held in freeze-frame. It becomes evident, as the backup arrives, that this gang wants to take me away.

Oh man, he collared Hitch and then called for back-up? Was this a fascist young thug or a New York cop? The whole incident actually sounds kind of funny, with Hitch failing to interest an actual cop and climbing in and out of taxis with his assailants, with the actual "beating" part not transpiring until he's hit from behind outside a cafe, at which point passersby intervene and Hitch manages to finally get a cab.

But the rest of his Vanity Fair piece is less fun. Hitch goes to a Hezbollah rally, and in order to properly express his disdain for these fanatics, he compares it to "a Shiite-Muslim mega-church" with "an onstage Muslim Milli Vanilli orchestra and choir," because trashy God-loving American culture is what Hitch really despises, even more than those fascists.

Hitch was beaten by local thugs affiliated with the crazy Syrian Social Nationalist Party, an either left- or right-wing group wishing to see basically all of the middle east joined as "Greater Syria." All because—like our very own Poster Boy!—he defaced a poster. Unfortunately it was a poster for the SSNP, and Hitch defaced it by writing "Fuck the SSNP" on it (that's the kind of brilliant rhetoric he's famous for) and there were some SSNP members right across the street, and they beat him up. According to this blog, "he is still walking with a limp."

According to this awesome blog, it's because Hitch was at the wrong bar, in the wrong neighborhood.

But not in a good way.

The Fox News Channel shouting head had flirted with the idea of making Hitchens an O'Reilly Factor pet. "I want to be polite tonight," he said, before asking Hitchens if his gay communist friends in New York hate waterboarding because they're arrogant or because they're charlatans.

The next thing you know, Hitchens is mentioning John McCain and human rights lapses at Guantanamo, and O'Reilly's lecturing him about how disappointed he is in Hitchens, who had thought was "a level headed guy."

The Hitch tried to placate his highly-rated host several times, kinda embarrassingly actually, but it was no use in the end.

You can go on O'Reilly's show as a right-wing bat-swinger or as a left-wing piñata. Hitchens is too smart to be asked on as the latter, and hopefully/apparently also too smart to go along with the former. His moments of meekness show he hoped he could fit in as a friend of the show; the rest of the video (highlights above) showed was unable to play the sycophant O'Reilly apparently craves.

"It seems to have been agreed by every single media outlet that only one group has the right to challenge Obama's promotion of 'Pastor' Rick Warren, and that group is the constituency of politically organized homosexuals."

That is but the first sentence, of many, in Hitch's fun new column about Warren, which is headlined "Fuck You and Your Fucking Joke of a God, Jesus-Dick." Ha, no, that is not the headline, because the editors of Slate only indulge Hitch so much (too much). Anyway, yes, all we media outlets got together a while back and decided that only "politically organized homosexuals" would be put off by this Warren character. We totally forgot drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjays!

Hitch, a politically unorganized heterosexual, dislikes Warren because of Syria.

And a shame, too, that on Inauguration Day we may also have to stand still—out of respect rather than fear, it is true—and listen to a man who is either a half-witted dupe, a hopeless naif, a cynical tourist who does favors for the powerful, a religious nut bag, a cowardly liar, or perhaps some unappetizing combination of all five. I personally think that the all-five answer is the correct one, because you cannot just find yourself in Syria, smirking into the face of the local despot and being treated like a treasured guest.

Then in the last paragraph he really goes off on Warren. Also there's another odd swipe at the gays, for being so selfish, what with hogging all the Warren-hating, and not caring about Syria.

(Photo: AFP/Getty Images)

I had never before been a special fan of that great comedian Phyllis Diller, but she utterly won my heart this week by sending me an envelope that, when opened, contained a torn-off square of brown-bag paper of the kind suitable for latrine duty in an ill-run correctional facility. Duly unfurled, it carried a handwritten salutation reading as follows:

Money's scarce
Times are hard
Here's your f******
Xmas card

I could not possibly improve on the sentiment, but I don't think it ought to depend on the current austerities. Isn't Christmas a moral and aesthetic nightmare whether or not the days are prosperous?

One of the wonderful things about Hitch is that he really has the sense of humor of, like, a slightly naughty 70-year-old. His Secret Santa would be wise to pony up for a volume of the Truly Tasteless Jokes series. (Also, breaking: Hitch found something a lady did funny!)

Hitch hates Christmas, because it's totalitarian. He can't even go to stores without hearing "the identical tinny, maddening, repetitive ululations" of Christmas. That's one thing he hates! The NOISE! NOISE! NOISE! NOISE!

All we're getting at is, should your child share some crazy story about an unkempt Santa, reeking of Scotch, taking your tree back to the North Pole for repairs, alert the authorities immediately.

Atlantic blogger Andrew Sullivan was once a very prominent, very influential conservative. As recently as last year, even as he largely abandoned Bush, he was still complimenting McCain. Now, not so much.

Times columnist David Brooks scarcely deserves to be called an intellectual, but as we're using that term strictly to mean "East Coast elitists who write about politics professionally" he'll have to do. This "I'm disappointed in McCain but he'll be a good president" column was but a prelude to Brooks' statement during an interview that Obama was a perceptive intellectual surrounded by impressive people and Sarah Palin is a cancer.

Christopher Buckley was hardly a doctrinaire conservative. As a satirical novelist and a smart-ass, one imagines he's not too pleased with the rise of creationist rubes in his beloved GOP (his dad made that fucking bed, obvs, but that's neither here nor there). And Chris claims he wrote in George H.W. Bush in 2004 rather than vote for the son. But that's far different from explicitly endorsing a Democrat, as he did last week. Once again: Obama's temperament and obvious intelligence sealed the deal.

Charles Krauthammer is basically a reliable party hack, always willing to subvert his own intelligence for the good of the party. But the once-influential psychiatrist can't help but see that his movement is not served by the buffoonery of the McCain campaign. He wrote this mild quasi-endorsement of Obama this month:

Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition — do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

And, also at The Atlantic, Ross Douthat, who wrote a book about how Republicans can save themselves, finds himself bewildered by McCain's campaign and unimpressed with the Ayers bullshit and Sarah Palin.

So. Is all that a trend? In the way that the closing of the New York Sun was indicative of the slow death of a movement if not necessarily caused by that death, we think we're seeing the further erosion of the always uneasy GOP pact between libertarian true believers, Christan fundamentalist true believers, nationalists, "just keep my taxes low" rich assholes, and the crowd that just likes to hitch their wagons to winners. A reorganization is on the way. Then most of these listed commentators will probably hop back on the bandwagon.

Also this is how we were originally planning on reporting the Hitch endorsement:

BREAKING: HITCH SMOKES TWO PACKS, DRINKS 5TH OF SCOTCH, ENDORSES TERRORIST

Today though, The Hitch decided to praise Obama's foreign policy. Is O polling so bad that to say nice things about him qualifies as sufficiently pathologically contrarian for Mr. Sarah Palin could be a secret genius? Or maybe Hitch counterintuitively decided to watch Obama on O'Reilly the other day and liked the fancy BBC presenter way Obama pronounces "Pakistan." Actually come to think of it that is probably what happened.

"Why, just some weeks ago Christopher Hitchens and his camera-ready conscience went and got themselves waterboarded for the pages of Vanity Fair, which are anyway torture enough." Zing!

"There are many things that might be said about such a stunt—that moral understanding is not arrived at by means of the senses, or by personal acquaintance with evil; that ordinary intelligence and ordinary imagination are quite sufficient to establish the foulness and the folly of such procedures, which is why judges who have not dressed up in Guantánamo drag have been able to rule persuasively against them; that the victims of waterboarding do not commonly towel down and head for the Waverly Inn" Zing!!

"but I have no intention of dignifying this high clowning with serious reflection. I hope only that Hitchens next tries rendition." ZING!!!

Anyway Chris ought to respond in kind, as he usually does, soon enough. Then they'll trade funny quips in various magazines for a month or two until Hich decks Leon at a Lally Weymouth party. (IF ONLY)

Apparently, Graydon Carter made him do it, which raises the question: Who was responsible for the two-part series on day spa makeovers?

[Vanity Fair]
[Video]

However, we are still obliged to ask ourselves whether the senior senator from Arizona is a brick short of a load or, as heartless people in England sometimes say, a sandwich or two short of a picnic. Because "anger," make no mistake about it, is the innuendo for instability or inadequacy. What if McCain doesn't really have both oars in the water or is either too tightly wrapped or not tightly wrapped enough?
[...]
Again, one hopes that the nominee has been doing this for emphasis rather than as a sign that he is out of his pram, has lost his rag, has gone ballistic, has reported into the post office that he's feeling terminally disgruntled today. (Or, as P.G. Wodehouse immortally put it, if not quite disgruntled, not exactly gruntled, either.)

One Angry Man [Slate]

"What's it like?" I asked her when I decided to face up and write this essay. "Well," she said as if she had had plenty of time to think about it. "It's a sort of one-man symphony orchestra. It ranges from a whistling bird to the sound of big boulders falling down a ravine. There's a chain saw in there somewhere. And a sniveling child making those noises that children make when they've just stopped crying: a sort of honk. A lot of the time it's in 4/4 or 6/8 regular time, but the worst is when it turns arrhythmic and cacophonous. And then sometimes it's just old-fashioned snoring, like Popeye or Homer Simpson."

SULLIVAN: Two things. One, it's important to clear up that he [Wright] did not say "The Jews are going to get you" in some conspiratorial, classic anti-Semitic fashion. I think that's just —

HITCHENS: He [Wright] thinks only Jews are going to object to [Rev. Louis] Farrakhan and [Libyan leader Moammar] Gadhafi. Excuse me?

SULLIVAN: No, he didn't say "only."

HITCHENS: No, but —

SULLIVAN: Again, you keep playing with that quote. We're happy to have it on the record. And now you've made me forget my second point, which is —

HITCHENS: Oh, well, don't be such a lesbian. Get on with it.

SULLIVAN: I'm sorry, I've forgotten my second point. But I do think that's important. And I don't think Wright is Farrakhan. And I don't think Obama, in any conceivable way, represents anything but racial inclusion and integration. And anybody that looks at any part of his career and can be in any doubt about that is beyond me.

The reason he went to that church, clearly, if you read his biography, is he wanted to understand what it was to be black in America. He didn't understand. He's a very polyglot person. He grew up in Hawaii, he had some time in Indonesia.

First, let's not waste too much time establishing the fact that Alessandra Stanley was such a bad choice to write this rebuttal piece that it makes you wonder if it was Hitchens that selected her. Hey style is ponderous; she is overlong in her explanations of obvious matters; and she approaches the issue as a topic for serious socio-cultural investigation, rather than an opportunity to crack jokes and talk shit. Which is what was called for. Stanley seems to believe that Hitchens can be refuted through logic, rather than by waiting until he's drunk, then videotaping a woman slapping him around and grabbing his balls until he screams, then putting that video on YouTube.

That's where you're wrong, Alessandra Stanley.

It's not clear whether Stanley is just a boring writer herself, or if she embodies some inherent un-funny quality in all women. But it doesn't matter what the truth is, because anyone looking for evidence to support their bias will hold up her article as a shining example of why women can't hack it.

There is obviously a difference between witty writers (Mme. de Staël, Nora Ephron, Fran Lebowitz) and stand-up comics. Stand-up comedy was always harder for women, because it is aggressive—comedians have to dominate their audiences and "kill," by common metaphor. Male listeners might make allowances for sparkling repartee—which is, after all, instinctive and responsive and manslaughter at the very worst. But a premeditated joke or routine can be murderous in the first degree.

Women either had to compete—head-on, in the aggressive style of Paula Poundstone or Lisa Lampanelli—or subvert the form and make themselves offbeat and likable, the way that Whoopi Goldberg and Ellen DeGeneres do. As Elaine May used to say regarding improv, "When in doubt, seduce." By and large, however, stand-up comedy is tougher and meaner, and the women who do it play by men's rules.

Yo, what? I was bored after the first sentence. See, that's how men are: bored, by Alessandra Stanley. Also maybe some other women humorists. The problem they have is they often talk about things that women can relate to—relationships with men, babies, periods, shopping, love. As a man, I can't relate to all that. That puts women comics at a distinct disadvantage when trying to win over me and my fellow men. This is obvious day, right here.

"But wait!" you protest, femininely. "Hitchens said women just aren't funny, not that men just couldn't relate to our humor." Dude, what? While you were making that argument, I was thinking about how cool it is that Hitchens supposedly smokes in the shower. Chris Hitchens is a brilliant, repugnant slob of a man, and any argument he makes should be taken as one from a male point of view. For him to say that women aren't funny is for him to say that they're not funny to him, a man. Everything else is just purposeful goading, which is a key element of male humor. Arguments to the contrary will probably get ignored, because that's what men do: ignore arguments to the contrary. That's why we have civilization, and wars.

So ladies, it would behoove you to just keep on concentrating on establishing your rightful share of power in the world, rather than trying to convince men that your comedians and whatnot are funny. Once you run as much of the media as we do, it'll be a moot point.

Booze-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay Christopher Hitchens, writing in Slate, is understandably outraged, particularly at the New York Times, who cleaned up Butz's language so much as to make one wonder what the fuss was all about (who doesn't want "satisfying sex"?). Also Hitch is outraged at the Muslims who control Canada. No, really.

Speaking of censoring obituaries, the Columbia Journalism Review tells us of the Des Moines Register's obit for a Mr. Ralph Gross, who wrote an article for CJR about "the state of present-day journalism." The obit fails to mention that said article was specifically about how terrible the Des Moines Register is. Any more egregious examples of obit white-washing? Send them our way.

(For our part, we plan on dying in a fashion so unspeakably filthy that no newspaper on Earth will be able even to allude to it. Feel free to send suggestions for that too.)

Truth and Consequences [Slate]
Rest in Piece [CJR]
Related: I Know Someone Who Really Is One Of Those Slang Words For Ladyparts [Choire SIcha]