Wonkette

Each week, veteran Condiwatcher Peter Huestis (also known as Princess Sparkle Pony) provides a summary of the searing wit and infinite wisdom of America’s Favorite Princess Diplomat™!

It was a superfun Condiweek, starting off with festive drinks in Dubai and ending with an apparently drunken farewell to an old friend. In between was another OMG SURPRISE! trip to Iraq and a frightening encounter with a dangerous bird. Relive the magic after the jump!

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John Granville was a hippie peacenik do-gooder buttinsky who went to the Sudan to help implement its 2005 “peace” agreement. He was being driven home from a New Year’s party when someone cut his car off, shot him 5 times, killed his local driver and drove off. When he asked for help, bystanders (including the police) initially refused for fear of “tampering with evidence,” but one person he begged to assist him as he lay bleeding, Nimat Malik, actually did help get him to the hospital where he eventually passed away after surgery. The Sudanese government says they’re pretty sure it’s just a random act of violence, but how can you really tell random violence from planned violence in Sudan anyway? Just because a gunman managed to cut off and shoot an American diplomat in a car at 4 am in Khartoum the day that a joint U.N.-African peacekeeping took control in Darfur, an offense that al-Quaida thinks merits a jihad, doesn’t mean that it’s not random, people, geez. Besides, this is what you get for trying to save the world, which is why Ron Paul wants to eliminate our presence overseas, to save the hippie peaceniks from themselves. [Yahoo News]

Jimmy Carter apparently traveled to Sudan recently to meet with President Omar Hassan al-Bashir (isn’t he too old to be traveling so far? Do they have McDonald’s there?) and ask him to please stop killing so many people in Darfur. He went with Nelson Mandela and some other “elder statesmen” and made al-Bashir sign a pledge or something and gave them $300 million to clean everything up. And now Mia Farrow is pissed!

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* Something about Bush just oozes envy of guys like Romeo Dallaire, and really, that’s the scariest thing of all. [DCeiver] MORE »

Jim McGovern (D-MA) becomes the first congressman arrested this year for reasons other than corruption. (AP) MORE »

While Condoleezza Rice is busy doing bicep curls, her State Department underlings are doing heavy lifting in the gossip department. For some reason, lately we’ve received a fair amount of State-related scuttlebutt. Here are some highlights.

A tipster tells us: “The U.S embassy in Sudan held a private dinner at their residence. [U.S. Charge d'Affaires] Cameron Hume was dropping the usual comments about the Sudanese goverment. A couple of Sudanese businessmen — incidentally, they don’t support the GOS whatsoever — felt he was being over the top. One told the ambassador that his comments were inflammatory and did nothing to foster better relations between the two countries. This is where it gets good. Apparently the man has a temper. So he said that they were like the businessmen in Nazi Germany and they indirectly supported the regime. They told him that his tone wasn’t acceptable. This is where it gets better. He told them to ‘Run tell your goverment and your Prophet too.’”

OH NO HE DIN’T!!! And did he draw a cartoon of the Prophet too? (If you think we’re making this up, the broad outlines of the story are confirmed by this news account.)

Additional gossip — concerning Deputy Secretary of State Robert Zoellick and the infamous Pamela Willeford, Ambassador to Switzerland and Dick Cheney hunting partner — appears after the jump.

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