It's an ill-wind

Republican party operative Dan Senor has married NBC (Nation's Best Catholics) reporter Campbell Brown. [At some point Google decided to place an old post of ours near the top of searches for information about the happy couple]. Anyway, Sunday's New York Times Style section report on the wedding notes an early mutual eye-catching:

But when he was offered the job as spokesman for the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad, it took him 60 seconds to accept, he said. For his first days on that job, he slept on the floor of a former palace of Saddam Hussein, taking showers with bottles of water. In March 2004, Ms. Brown appeared in the crowd of journalists covering one of his daily news conferences. She was doing a story on Abu Ghraib prison for NBC.

Not that you need another sign of media-political coziness, but there's a curious little note at the end of the NYT piece:

Frank Bruni contributed reporting from Beaver Creek for this article.

So Frank, the paper's restaurant critic, was at the wedding, no doubt a nod to his quality 2000 campaign reporting:

BRUNI (pgh 1): It was not enough for Vice President Al Gore to venture a crisp pronunciation of Milosevic, as in Slobodan, the Yugoslav president who refuses to be pried from power. Mr. Gore had to go a step further, volunteering the name of Mr. Milosevic’s challenger, Vojislav Kostunica. Then he had to go a step beyond that, noting that Serbia plus Montenegro equals Yugoslavia. And as Mr. Gore loped effortlessly through the Balkans, barely able to suppress his self-satisfied grin, it became ever clearer that the point of all the thickets of consonants and proper nouns was not a geopolitical lesson. It was more like oratorical intimidation, an unwavering effort to upstage and unnerve an opponent whose mind and mouth have never behaved in a similarly encyclopedic fashion.

This was Gore's reward -- in the "liberal" New York Times -- for having the wiped the floor with a patently unqualified candidate Bush in a presidential debate. The rest is history. As they say at Private Eye, trebles all round!