Ed Driscoll is just tearing it up over at his site today.

First up, Ed discusses the demise of the lefty rag Newsweek.  Back in the day, when people still read it, apparently everyone worked drunk after lunch.

MEDIA What was Newsweek like in its glory days? Full of drunks, apparently. You’d turn in your copy, it would be edited and laid out, then a senior editor would come back from a three-martooni lunch and tear it all up. But it was great because there was lots of money and no one ever questioned your expense account.

Goldman: Way, way back in the day, Newsweek commissioned the Maysles Brothers, who were famous documentary filmmakers, to do a promotional film for the magazine. They hung out with cameras around the offices, followed the whole editorial process. Toward the end of the film there was a scene of the Wallenda dinner, and the Wallies were just hammered. And they still used the film to promote the magazine. I was astonished.

 Thomas: Eventually they moved the dinners indoors, up to Top of the Week [the Newsweek dining room], as a way of keeping everybody from getting drunk and disappearing into the night.

 Hackett: It was also much cheaper.

 Goldman: Russ Chapell was a Nation writer when I arrived in ‘62, not long pre-Graham. He was the best newsmagazine writer I think I’ve ever known. He told me something early in my career. “This is a great job,” he said. “You can do it drunk.” And a lot of Newsweek people did.

I guess after everyone sobered up, the quality went down and then they went out of business.  No loss, really.

Next Driscoll rips into the media idiot of the week, David Gregory, who managed to beclown himself publicly while trying to ambush NRA head Wayne LaPierre.  Let's go direct to the good stuff:

Don Knotts’ Barney Fife character was a fictional television deputy sheriff who famously carried only one bullet in his shirt pocket, so that he could do the least amount of harm to criminals, the citizens of Mayberry RFD, and not least of which, himself.

Starring on a television network that’s become increasingly famous in recent years for its fictionalized news, David Gregory is a journalist who goes Barney Fife one better, becoming the first man to shoot himself in the foot with an empty gun magazine.

“David Gregory intended to demonstrate on Meet The Press what he regards as the absurdity of America’s lax gun laws,” Mark Steyn writes in his latest column. “Instead, he’s demonstrating the ever-greater absurdity of America’s non-lax laws:”

A week ago on NBC’s “Meet The Press,” David Gregory brandished on screen a high-capacity magazine. To most media experts, a “high-capacity magazine” means an ad-stuffed double-issue of Vanity Fair with the triple-page perfume-scented pullouts. But apparently in America’s gun-nut gun culture of gun-crazed gun kooks, it’s something else entirely, and it was this latter kind that Mr. Gregory produced in order to taunt Wayne LaPierre of the NRA. As the poster child for America’s gun-crazed gun-kook gun culture, Mr. LaPierre would probably have been more scared by the host waving around a headily perfumed Vanity Fair. But that was merely NBC’s first miscalculation. It seems a high-capacity magazine is illegal in the District of Columbia, and the flagrant breach of D.C. gun laws is now under investigation by the police.

This is, declared NYU professor Jay Rosen, “the dumbest media story of 2012.” Why? Because, as CNN’s Howard Kurtz breezily put it, everybody knows David Gregory wasn’t “planning to commit any crimes.”

So what? Neither are the overwhelming majority of his fellow high-capacity-magazine-owning Americans. Yet they’re expected to know, as they drive around visiting friends and family over Christmas, the various and contradictory gun laws in different jurisdictions. “Ignorantia juris non excusat” is one of the oldest concepts in civilized society: ignorance of the law is no excuse. Back when there was a modest and proportionate number of laws, that was just about do-able. But in today’s America there are laws against everything, and any one of us at any time is unknowingly in breach of dozens of them. And, in this case, NBC was informed by the D.C. police that it would be illegal to show the thing on TV, and they went ahead and did it, anyway: You’ll never take me alive, copper! You’ll have to pry my high-capacity magazine from my cold dead fingers! When the D.C. SWAT team, the FBI and the ATF take out NBC News, and the whole building goes up in one almighty fireball, David Gregory will be the crazed loon up on the roof like Jimmy Cagney in “White Heat”: “Made it, Ma! Top of the world!” At last, some actual must-see TV on that lousy network.

With the help of a Photoshop of Gregory (which I won’t spoil for you, click over to see it), Ann Althouse writes, “I finally figured out what David Gregory displaying that prop reminds me of:”

The plan was for LaPierre to babble lamely, scrambling to explain it away, like the kid trying to concoct some cockamamie reason why that (whatever) got into his room. He’d look foolish and guilty, as Dad continues to hold up the item which the kid knows will be the defeat of every idea that flashes through his stupid, stupid brain.

The scenario didn’t play out as scripted. LaPierre is a stolid veteran of many a confrontational interview. He’s not going to let the interviewer get the upper hand that easily. Somebody needs to tell Gregory: We all want the hand. Hand is tough to get.

Driscoll's place is truly a steak dinner with dessert, coffee, and a blond.   He's got it all.