Hollywood celebrities' political thoughts? Sign me up!

So today is apparently the debut of The Huffington Post, a left-leaning blog-type site offered up by Arianna Huffington. Not something I'd have marked on my calendar, of course; but I came across it and took a look.

I probably shouldn't be one to bash someone else's work, but this does appear to be a stinker. I'll point you to an interesting negative commentary for something more in-depth, but as far as my thoughts:

• The subhead for the site reads, "DELIVERING NEWS AND OPINION SINCE MAY 9, 2005." I know you're blogging for the ages, but perhaps could you have come up with something for today, which didn't actually imply you'd only been doing this for a few hours?
  
• There is a more or less overt sense that this is meant as a counterpoint to the
  Drudge Report, which many seem to think is some kind of right-wing bastion. Drudge, however, is generally a collection of links to interesting news bits (right now, one of the headlines is "PRINCE CAUGHT SMOKING..."--there's the right-wing bias for you), and the only editorial content is generally the headlines. Sure, there are Drudge "exclusives," but any regular reader knows these are wrong about 70% of the time.
  
• But the real problem with Arianna's blog is simply that the commentary is terrible. It's no better than what you'd read elsewhere (certainly not better than anything I can come up with); and where it tries to be funny (too much!), it simply falls down. And this is the stuff they've had lots of time to produce. What will be spewed out when they have to come up with material every few days or so?
  
• The worst thing, the absolutely worst thing for me was David Mamet's contribution. It is not worthy of him. I admit that my knowledge of his corpus is not strong, but a man who cried at the death of Barrett Bonden certainly knows a thing or two about writing.
  

Look, maybe I am some kind of right-wing shill. But go and take a look for yourself and I bet you'll agree with me. I mean, who came up with this idea, anyway? "Hey, let's get a lot of Hollywood personalities--people who make their living in a visual medium--and see how well they write! People will flock to it!" The Left, simply put, deserves better.