Aubrey O'Day clarifies her love of fascists, communists

There's a certain amount of chilling down of your cerebal cortex to be able to follow the latest twists in the life of Aubrey O'Day, out of Puff Daddy's play-band Danity Kane.

Having quit the sort-of-band to concentrate on showing her breasts to Playboy readers, O'Day was - it seems - a natural choice to appear on Sean Hannity's Fox News programme to talk about things like she was an expert.

She made the slight slip, however, of forgetting where she was and happened to mention an admiration for Fidel Castro. On Fox News. It's like going into church and suggesting that Satan is alright:

"I met him and worked with him when I was in Cuba," she said. "I'm not defending his behavior in many instances, but I do have to say that I will 100 percent agree he's an incredibly brilliant man."

Now, on a proper news programme, with a host rather than an I Speak Your Weight machine with a TalkRadio box spliced on top, this could prove to be an interesting entree into a discussion about the pros and cons of the Castro regime, and the extent to which the interests of that country's citizens have been sidelined in a decades-long battle between Castro and capitalism.

Being Hannity, though, he merely squawked "he's a murderer", like O'Day had said, ooh, that a man dying of cancer shouldn't spend his last days in a foreign cell.

Again, Hannity's stupidity wouldn't have been a problem if he'd been parading it in front of someone who was able to grasp an argument and use it. Instead:

[O'day] responded, "I'm sure I've met a lot of murderers in life. I'm not condoning [his actions]. [The United States has] supported a lot of murderers. I'm specifically addressing [U.S. Representative Diane Watson's] comment suggesting that he is a brilliant man. I'm sure many murderers are brilliant people."

"...like this one time, Professor Plum managed to use a candlestick in the kitchen - but how could he have found a candlestick without a candle in it in the dark?"

As if the aburdity wasn't already reduced enough, Hannity decided to take it further. Because you know who's like Castro? Hitler, that's who:

she said, "Listen, I don't condone Hitler one ounce, but yes, he was a brilliant man. Can you guys say that he wasn't? He ran a country and convinced everyone of horrible things."

"Excellent at organising a country, and pretty persuasive at pushing a sometimes unappealing agenda" is - we've weighed it - not quite one ounce of condoning. This, of course, is measured on the Bryan Ferry of "ooh, that architecture" Nazi scale.

Naturally, you can't go on TV and say "look, Hitler was smart enough to run an entire country" and not have your management team rush out some sort of half-assed statement to try and stop people thinking of Hitler when they're looking a photos of your breasts. And so it goes:

In the statement released to MTV News, the singer reasserts what she said on the show, emphasizing that just because she thinks they were smart doesn't mean she condones the notorious leaders' "evil behavior."

"Murderers and dictators generally are some of the smartest people out there — they just use their brain power for evil purposes," O'Day said. "I don't condone any of their evil behavior, but I was asked about their intellectual firepower ... and in my opinion you can't have a low IQ and wreak that much havoc on the world. What Hitler succeeded in doing was deplorable. And I hope we never see such an abusive use of power again."

Her people edited out the next paragraph which rambled on for a bit along the lines of "hey, in fact... people with IQs can do bad stuff, so why don't we just round them up and put them in some sort of compound where they can't do any harm? Like we could lay a trail of sudokos or something and gather them up...".

So, that's all cleared up, then. In short: Neither Hannity nor O'Day should be allowed near anything requiring the ability to think more than one big thought at a time. At least we can be sure neither of them are likely to wreak very much havoc on the world.

Aubrey O'Kane: Nothing left to hide

Danity Kane are, roughly, the closest thing America has to a Girls Aloud. Born on a reality game show, and destroyed by internal tensions. Okay, perhaps they're a bit closer to The Sugababes.

Anyway, Aubrey O'Day was judged to have been hogging the limelight, but if the hope of the remaining Danitys was that kicking her off the train would allow them to get some of the attention, it's backfired. O'Day is now running off to do Playboy:

"I've also done the cover of Playboyfor 2009," she said late in December. "For one of the months in 2009. I'm not gonna say it. ... It's gonna be a surprise. You know, I think that Playboy for me was one of the most liberating things that I've done as a woman."

For the record, shooting a moose with a stun-gun was the most liberating thing she did when she was a man.

I know what you're thinking: "It was so liberating" is a kind of stock, meaningless word-spurt that PR people usually tell women who've fallen on hard times to say. Perhaps, though, O'Day could explain a bit more clearly?

"You could never imagine how empowering it is to be nude in front of cameras and have people looking at you in that way and seeing you as beautiful."

Empowering. Liberating. Being in Playboy. Really.

Has anyone explained to O'Day exactly how people will be using her pictures?

Gordon in the morning: The difference between wit and crudity

Gordon claims that Pearl Spam and Gavin Rossdale's kid "model" Daisy Lowe is dating Mark Ronson. Clearly, he's got a problem as this is his big story for that day, and "Ronson dating Lowe" is all he's got. Trouble is, he's had to spin a three word story into 500-odd words - so desperate to fill the piece, not only does he mention Powder but even finds space to mention Institute, Rossdale's barely-functioning vanity project.

Let's assume that it's just the desperation of trying to fill a page from nothing that accounts for the awful headline:

Pushing up Daisy

We know Gordon isn't writing for the Church Times, but even by his standards that stands out as a spectacularly crass and crude piece of work.

In fact, it's starting to look like Smart is struggling to find anything to fill his acres of space with. Woman you've never heard of wears tight t-shirt, anybody? Even Gordon acknowledges that he's struggling with the "celebrity" value of this piece of celebrity gossip:

US GIRL group DANITY KANE are fairly unknown over here.

But...

Is there a but?

member AUBERY O'DAY is doing her best to change that by wearing this see-through top.

The top, it's worth noting, isn't actually see-through at all, but you can - if you're about thirteen years old and have nothing better to do - make out the shape of her nipple through it when a photo is taken in bright light.

Hmmm. Photos of breasts of anonymous young women. You could buy Nuts if you really wanted that, couldn't you?

It's also worth pointing out that, far from trying to make Danity Kane "known over here" by wearing clothes, O'Day was actually turning up for an interview with MTV in America. Is it really plausible that she thought "let's see if I can get in the British papers by accidentally showing the shape of a nipple?"