EDDIE AND RUDY

In entertainment news:

... [Eddie] Murphy's comedy "Norbit" ... opened as the top weekend movie with $33.7 million, according to studio estimates Sunday.

..."Norbit" was the 14th No. 1 opening for Murphy and came in well above the expectations of distributor Paramount, which had projected the movie might pull in about $25 million over its opening weekend.

...Murphy plays mild-mannered Norbit [and] his grossly overweight and overbearing wife...

That's the biggest movie opening of the year, even though Norbit was trashed by critics. And two weeks from now, Eddie Murphy's going to win an Oscar for Dreamgirls.

Moviegoers spent $33 million to see Eddie Murphy looking like this:



So do you still think America can't handle this?



I'll keep saying it: This kind of drag is not about gender-bending. This kind of drag is about pretending to be making fun of yourself, while actually mocking women tapping into the belief that they (or at least the ones who aren't hot babes) are grotesque and disgusting. This kind of drag is quite palatable to the mainstream.

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Speaking of Giuliani, when is he going to be subjected to the early attacks Barack Obama's dealing with? After all, he's the GOP's Obama -- the guy who's exceeding expectations and looking like a much more serious contender that the convention wisdom predicted.

This weekend, Obama took two vicious hits from the right -- William Kristol said his Iraq stance is the moral equivalent of tolerating slavery ("Obama's speech is a 'can't we get along' speech -- sort of the opposite of Lincoln. He would have been with Stephen Douglas in 1858") and Australian prime minister John Howard said he's giving aid and comfort to al-Qaeda ("If I were running al-Qa'ida in Iraq, I would put a circle around March 2008 and be praying as many times as possible for a victory not only for Obama but also for the Democrats"). Prior to that, Mike Allen at the Politico described in detail "the coming effort to dismantle" Obama.

What are the Democrats doing to Giuliani? Why aren't they working right now to undermine him? I think they're being like the pre-'06 Democrats -- hoping things will go their way rather than trying to make them go their way. I think they're counting on Giuliani to stumble in the primaries -- and if he doesn't, I half-think they're counting on that drag image to beat him all by itself.

If so, that's nuts. They have to assume he can win and start road-testing anti-Giuliani messages now.

Meanwhile, here's Giuliani in California:

Republican presidential hopeful Rudolph W. Giuliani praised President Bush's war leadership on Saturday....

The former New York City mayor came to Bush's defense as he promoted his White House candidacy at a California Republican convention. Drawing parallels between Iraq and America's Civil War, Giuliani compared Bush's political troubles to Abraham Lincoln's. When the Civil War was unpopular, Giuliani said, Lincoln "kept his eye ahead."

"He was able to say, 'I know my people are frustrated, and I know my people are angry at me.' " But after weighing public opinion, Lincoln had "that ability that a leader has -- a leader like George Bush, a leader like Ronald Reagan -- to look into the future," Giuliani said....

Let's start with a message about Giuliani (and McCain and Romney and the whole damn lot of them): No third term. I want to hear prominenrt Democrats saying that. No one whose represents continuity with the Bush's presidency should be president -- and all praise of Bush needs to be highlighted. Right now the public thinks Giuliani is a "moderate" and McCain is a "maverick." We have to hang George W. Bush around their necks -- because, in the general election, whoever emerges will finesse that connection, and the press will either pretend that Giuliani's praise or McCain's hug didn't happen or shrug it off as trivia. That can't be allowed to happen.