First, it's important to keep in mind that Weaver — who's got the sickest press credentials in all the land - is only just starting out, and he already has a Wikipedia Page. His inflated Mediaite ranking is sure to follow. And after this: so is a call from ESPN. Watch as he deftly handles a question regarding who he's going to interview next, and the follow-up, in which he doesn't consider speaking with Michael Vick — who, if he were to speak with Weaver, would be granting him a courtesy interview - about dog fighting.

He might as well have said, Lady, I'm just a fuckin' kid. Back off. And he would've been right. Why, of all the questions, of all the people he just gave you, would you ask the most blatantly insensitive one? The kid's twelve, the world has Bob Costas for that kind of thing, and his ambition to be Wolf Blitzer over some MSNBC moving face surely looks like a far more nuanced ambition now than it did before. Blitzer would never toss him a few softballs and then try to hit him with the pitch.

Even better, though, was Weaver's shutdown of his questioner: subtle, as polite as possible, and intelligent. Hell, it shows the makings of a good Press Secretary, too. Gibbs: protect your neck, son. Damon Weaver's comin' up on you.

The segment began with Vick telling the world how he realizes what he did was wrong and how so very sorry he is for having done it:

The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, it's no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I felt. And that was the reason I cried so many nights. And that put it all into perspective...I let myself down, not being out on the football field, being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk, writing letters home, you know. That wasn't my life. That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I thought was right, that I thought it was cool. and I thought it was fun, and it was exciting at the time. It all led to me laying in a prison bunk by myself with no one to talk to but myself.

Asked who he blames for it all, Vick responded, "I blame me."

Brown, who reportedly scooped NBC's Bob Costas and America's thuggish overlord/fast food terrorist Oprah in scoring the interview, didn't seem to go easy on Vick and asked all of the questions one would reasonably hope he would ask. The big post-interview question in the public's mind now seems to be, "Are Michael Vick's expressions of remorse sincere?" Judging by the comments in the thread attached to the story on CBS' website and on Twitter, it seems as though most people think he's full of shit and thus should be punished further and in barbaric fashion, which is just plain ridiculous.

Keeping in mind that the crimes Mike Vick pled guilty to are horrific in ways unimaginable to most of us, the guy served his time behind bars as dictated by this country's legal system and did so without incident, losing a multi-million dollar personal fortune and his dignity along the way. Now he's out trying to put the pieces of his broken life back together again, working closely with the humane society to educate inner city kids about the immoralities of animal abuse, and his detractors are still not happy, nor will they ever be frankly. Even if there was some way to tap into Michael Vick's soul to prove without a doubt that he really does feels guilty about what he did, there still would be a large segment of the population that wouldn't be satisfied unless Vick himself were mauled by blood-thirsty dogs inside of cage in an arena filled with thousands of screaming animal rights activists and broadcast around the world on television.

Sadly, many of the unforgiving seem to be of the liberal persuasion, the left side of the ideological spectrum where virtues such as empathy, forgiveness and tolerance are supposed to be most revered, proving once again that hypocrisy knows no political boundaries.

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Take it away, enraged blogger:

Hoax's reign as the scapegoat du jour dates back to the Boston "Aqua Teen Hunger Force" debacle in February of this year. "Two plead not guilty to Boston hoax charges" the CNN headline read, and the Boston authorities used the word "hoax" to describe the incident as often as they could. And the advantages of labeling something like this a hoax are obvious: you didn't massively overreact to a situation that the average person recognized as harmless, you were tricked into doing so! You didn't just take a quotation from a clearly phony article on a random webpage and build a story around in, you were duped! I'm not an idiot, I'm just easily gulled!

The Hoax [Defective Yeti]

• The language in the complaint to the Department of Children and Family Services about Britney Spears' mistreatment of her kids, which included "allegations of poor dental hygiene, as well as poor eating and sleeping habits," also showed up in a legal brief K-Fed's lawyer filed today. Huh. [TMZ]
  
• Sir Harry "Tina Brown's husband" Evans has demanded that the village of Quogue do something about the erosion occurring on the beach outside his estate before the rampaging ocean causes"grave damage to our considerable amenities." Then the whole beach was washed away by all of our tears of sympathy. [Page Six]
  
• Former NFL star Michael Vick thinks Jesus will be able to help him smooth over the whole dogfighting scandal. [TMZ]

Good point, Al! The injustice of it all! One problem: MSNBC's article (since corrected) wasn't exactly quoting the reverend's personal blog at all: It took the passage from NewsGroper, a fairly popular parody site, which includes the words "Fake Parody Blogs" in the title bar of every one of its pages. The next time someone trots out the adage about bloggers not being reporters, we're going to note that reporters aren't exactly reporters these days either.

Vick case divides African-American leaders [MSNBC]
Don't let this guilty plea fool you, Vick is innocent (like OJ) [NewsGroper]

"Does anyone besides me see the hypocrisy of some on the left who go nuts about Michael Vick and the whole dog fighting thing and yet are the same people who don't care about the loss of human life caused by illegal aliens or are the same people who fight for the right to kill unborn babies?" asks Campfield. He quotes a friend who notes that, "If Terry [sic] Schiavo was a dolphin or a dog (or a wale) [sic] she would still be alive today." Then it gets better!

Dog fighting is cruel and inhumane. But if Vick could have figured out a way to pit two unborn babies against each other in a fight to the death, maybe we'd outlaw killing children as quickly as we rushed to enhance penalties for crimes involving our pets.

Love dogs, Hate people. [Camp4U, via]