The Rude Pundit (read at your own risk)

[shin]

George and Harriet - The Bestest of Friendsies:
So, apparently, George W. Bush's nominee to the Supreme Court, Harriet Miers, had a problem with taking shits on the sidewalks of Austin. Or else she couldn't stop herself from studying stray piles of turds on the streets of Laredo. It had to be one or the other because otherwise why would Bush, when Governor of Texas, write a P.S. to one of his "thank you" notes to Miers that reads "No more public scatology"? Now, one could say that maybe Bush was cautioning Miers that the two of them should avoid going to the parks of Dallas to engage in a little scat play, where Bush jacked off after shitting on Miers' face. Whatever the case may be, it's not a huge leap of logic to see that private scatology is fine with Bush, just not, you know, the public variety. Or Bush just doesn't know what the word "scatology" means.

Yes, the letters between Bush and Miers reveal quite the friendly relationship between them, with Miers' affections for Bush resting somewhere between cock worship and train porter behavior. One might say it's all just chummy. The rest of us would say it's creepy. Example: For the sake of argument, say that you're a grown woman, a professional, in your fifties, and you are friends with the governor of the state, as well as his occasional lawyer and a political appointee. Let's say that you're late getting a birthday card to the governor.

Chances are you would not send a Hallmark card with a sad puppy and "I'm Sorry I Missed Your Birthday" on the cover, with the pre-printed verse message, "This is the wish/That should have been sent/Before your Birthday/Came and went." Chances are you would not add a note that said, "You are the best Governor ever - deserving of great respect!" Chances are you wouldn't handwrite in "Sorry" next to the pre-printed message. Chances are you wouldn't write at the bottom, "At least for thirty days - you are not younger than me." You might do these things if you were writing to a child, a well-loved niece or nephew whose birthday slipped your mind while you were too busy with, say, your fuckin' job. But if you were that fiftysomething professional with your fiftysomething professional governor-friend, wouldn't you wanna act like an adult? 'Cause, really, and, c'mon, a fuckin' puppy dog card?

When you read the little notes Harriet and George sent to each other, especially the ones from Harriet, since George's writing style looks like that of a psychotic illiterate, you get the image of two people: a man desperate to be admired, to be seen as great, and a woman on her knees, assuring the man she's fellating that his dick is so huge, just sooo goddamn huge. In one letter thanking Bush for sending birthday wishes to her partner's mother, Miers adds, "You and Laura are the greatest!" (Miers is inordinately fond of the exclamation point, like a hyperactive cheerleader. It's suprising her i-dots aren't smiley faces and hearts.) In a thank-you card, Miers opens, "Hopefully, Jenna and Barbara recognize that their parents are 'cool'- as do the rest of us." Which sounds like code for smoking dope and swapping partners at parties in the governor's mansion, with Nathan Hecht and George watching as Harriet and Laura go at it like rutting weasels on the carpet emblazoned with the seal of Texas.

And then there's all the times that Miers assures Bush that he's just, gee-whiz, the bestest, most awesomest thing that everest happened to Texas: "Texas is blessed!" and "You are the best!" and "Thank you for all you and Laura do for the people of our State!" and "The state is in great hands" and "Texas has a very popular Governor and First Lady!" This kind of fluffing goes far, far beyond the usual compliments and gets into the type of flattery we associate with the official human footstools of the court of Louis XIV, a constant reassurance that the king is always right and noble.

What we witness in these personal notes is the infantilization that surrounds George W. Bush, which, to get back to the scatology, makes sense. Because those who are into scat play are often into diaper fantasies, where a strong woman who acts like a mother type, cooing and praising, changes the shit-filled diapers of a grown man who is behaving like a baby. What a hard-on the diaper fetishist gets when "Mommy" praises him for taking such a huge poop, powdering his grown bottom and balls, saying, "You're such a big boy, aren't you? Aren't you?" God, how the fetishist'll cum buckets when Mommy blows belly farts.[/i]

[shin]

I also figure this can be a thread dedicated to being rude to each other. New threads and all that

[Mary]

Wow. I am soooooooooooo tired of seeing women who have been nominated for powerful positions instantly cast in the role of fellater.

Perhaps the "rude" pundit should change his name to the predictably misogynistic pundit.

Ugh, sorry, I have so little tolerance for this line of attack against Harriet Miers. Can we just focus on her record, or lack thereof, or professional competence for the job? The fact that she occasionally writes cutesy notes to George W. Bush tells me nothing - NOTHING - about her qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice. It does suggest I probably wouldn't really get along with her in person, but she's not applying to be my roommate.

M

[shin]

I don't consider him misogynist whatsoever. You should see what he says about Karl Rove. Besides, you were warned!

mary said:

Ugh, sorry, I have so little tolerance for this line of attack against Harriet Miers. Can we just focus on her record, or lack thereof, or professional competence for the job? The fact that she occasionally writes cutesy notes to George W. Bush tells me nothing - NOTHING - about her qualifications to be a Supreme Court Justice. It does suggest I probably wouldn't really get along with her in person, but she's not applying to be my roommate.

It tells me she's completely biased in favor of this administration and will vote in favor of it 100% of the time should anything White House related be brought before the SC. She's effectively a mole for the administration and nothing more. If that's not enough to disqualify a person from being appointed to the highest court in the land, America is officially a shell of its former self.

[chrisfan]

Yeah, it sure is a pisser the way the founding fathers put that loop hole into their design for our government that would allow the president to circumvent the entire separation of powers structure with a single nomination. And to think it took 43 presidents before one of them figured it out!

And ripping Rove too does not mean we're not dealing with a misogynist here. YOu can have no regard for women, and still hate some men. It's not an either or proposition.

I agree with the Mary's comments. A female nominee should be judged as a nominee - not on grounds of whether or not her behavior is fitting to that of a woman. There's an implication of her being beholdent to Bush in that piece which would not be there in a discussion of a male nominee. There are very very valid issues at hand to be debated in this nomination. It's a shame that such debate is lost because the choice is made to harp on petty gossip instead.

[rockysigman]

Regardless of whether or not she's too beholden to this administration, there's too many other things to focus on that disqualify her to bother even worrying about that, IMO. Every president tries to nominate someone who will rule favorably to them (with varying degrees of success), but to me the bigger issue is that there doesn't seem to be much evidence (or, well, any evidence whatsoever) that she's really ever expressed any thoughts on major constitutional issues. It's one thing to have never been a judge before (although there are quite a few justices in our history who weren't judges before being named to the Supreme Court), but she hasn't even really taken part in any sort of scholarly debate or what have you. Most nominees are proven constitutional theorists and have added something substantial to legal and constitutional questions, either through scholarly publication or by serving as a judge at another level. Miers just seems to be his personal attorney.

And I'm sure she's a very good attorney. I'm even willing to believe that she's among the best in her field. But I think a Supreme Court justice should have some sort of record for weighing constitutional issues and not just performing strong service for clients.

I don't know if she's too close the president or not, but that seems like such a minor issue compared to her lack of qualifications that it hardly seems worth focusing on.

[chrisfan]

And THAT is a thoughtful, non-misogynistic critique of Harriet Meiers!

Which is a good time for the moderator part of me to point out that there is already a thread for Supreme Court issues, and honestly, this should all be moved over there.

[shin]

There Goes Crazy Ass George Again:
Imagine you're at your favorite bar, a neighborhood joint, named after the owner in just one word ("Joe's" or "Juanita's"), where all the crap hanging on the walls is the real deal, stuff that Joe or Juanita actually picked up at real ball parks, stadiums, and rinks, not just ordered out of a bar decor catalog. It ain't the nicest place, but, hell, it's just down the street and Juanita knows just how strong you like your third and fourth whiskey sours.

At the end of the bar, in the dark corner near the tiny johns, sits Crazy Ass George, twitchin' and mumblin', clinging to that glass mug like it's a life preserver, swirlin' that shot around like it's holy water. And despite all the times he's passed out and fallen off that stool, all the times he's threatened to fight the pool players who bump him with their cues, he's always there. And Crazy Ass George, he's got those shakes, man, the never-quite-endin' DTs, always movin' with a little jitter. Crazy Ass George was a nuthouse schizoid for a good part of the 1970s, set free back in the Reagan era to wander the streets until he found this corner of this bar. He never served in Vietnam, but he sure can talk like he did.

Crazy Ass George sees things, shit no one else sees, and you get him tanked up enough, he'll start tellin' you about all the phantoms and demons that are floatin' around him. When he gets goin', like Henry Darger on his last Vivian Girl bender, Crazy Ass George'll spin whole universes of bugfuck insane shit. He calls them "evil," he calls them "radical," and he talks about how they wanna take over the world of human beings. It's a pity, Juanita'll tell you, how Crazy Ass George was just a crap-his-own-pants alcoholic until September 11, 2001, when all of a sudden his gibberish began to take on this apocalyptic tone.

You may even sit and listen to him for a moment or two, hearing him babble on about "Evil men, obsessed with ambition and unburdened by conscience, must be taken very seriously -- and we must stop them before their crimes can multiply." You can make out phrases like "enslave whole nations and intimidate the world" and "the rage of the killers" and "cold-blooded contempt for human life."

Yes, you listen to Crazy Ass George long enough and you're gonna start to sense harpy wings blowing a breeze that ruffles your hair, you're gonna feel claws testing the elasticity of your flesh, you're gonna smell a breath decadent with human gore wafting across your nostrils. When you're in that corner with Crazy Ass George, all sorts of horrors can seem real, immediate, and terrible. And those horrors must be stopped before they rip our children from our arms and drag them, screaming, into realms of hell we have only dreamt of.

You shake yourself free of Crazy Ass George. Surely, you realize, we live in dangerous times, times of monsters real and sentient. But we simply cannot exist as Crazy Ass George believes we ought to, on our guard constantly, scanning the sky for endless chimeric enemies, bolting our doors to our neighbors. It's soul-withering and, ultimately, renders us victims as well. And then there's the other possibilities: that Crazy Ass George is completely, utterly wrong, or that Crazy Ass George is the demon himself, and one day someone will show you the dump where he tossed the corpses of burnt children. Besides, Crazy Ass George is just a worthless, slurring drunk, right?

You turn to leave the bar, something Crazy Ass George won't do until he's pissed himself and the bar stool. And outside, where the rest of us are, there's only the cool breeze, smelling of rich autumn, blowing away the scent of summer decay, and stars, man, bright fuckin' stars, against a big, dark, endless sky, and earth under your feet that'll take you back home.

[rockysigman]

chrisfan said:

And THAT is a thoughtful, non-misogynistic critique of Harriet Meiers!

Which is a good time for the moderator part of me to point out that there is already a thread for Supreme Court issues, and honestly, this should all be moved over there.

But my post wasn't necessarily a commentary on the Supreme Court nominee, but a response on the Rude Pundit's statement...so, I guess it's appropriate for both boards. So there!

[shin]

Of Deteriorating Dams and Drowning Men:
In Taunton, Massachusetts, the people are waiting to see if the dam bursts. The Whittenton Pond Dam is falling apart, and no one knows if it can hold back the flow of water from the Mill River and Lake Sabbatia. There's been, as you may know, a hell of a lot of rain in the Northeast of late. Dams can only hold so much. It's a wooden dam that's been breached before, but this time the whole thing may break apart, sending six feet of water into the small city of 50,000. Some residents have already left, but many are staying in Taunton, wanting to ride out the flood, protect property, act macho, who knows. Surely, if the dam breaks, some of those people will drown.

Drowning is a horrible way to die. Human beings are built to breathe - it is a reflex, not a choice, and even if it is suppressed, the body will take over the mind and try to breathe. When you attempt to breathe when all around you is water, you will suck in water. This will send your mind and body into a panic state, and you will try to cough out the water. However, since you are surrounded by it, you will merely inhale more water. Your throat will constrict to try to prevent the water from entering your lungs. Another bodily reflex is the will to live, but in this case, your body will fail. Yes, water will be diverted to your stomach, but eventually, in the vast majority of drownings, it will get to your lungs. Generally, if you're lucky, this happens after you've gone unconscious. The worst part of drowning, though, is that you know you're drowning, and there's nothing you can do about it, even though you will try. You will suffer asphyxiation. Your organs will fail. And you will die, probably floating, bobbing in the water, feeding the fish.

Taunton is a town filled with anxiety right now. The mayor and everyone in there, save a few cynical reporters, are hoping that the dam holds. If it does hold, chances are there will be some minor patching done to the privately-owned wooden structure. Everyone will go on with their lives as if nothing was going to happen, although some will keep in the back of their heads that the dam almost burst apart; some may even call for a complete re-building of the dam, that to wait for the next storm to warn them once more would be dangerous. Those people will be dismissed as fools.

If the Whittenton Pond Dam breaks into pieces, the worst part will be not knowing what will be wrecked, what will be preserved, who will be swept away, who will be safe. All that's known is that Taunton will have to figure out how to renegotiate its identity, having been around since the 17th century, having been part of so much of the history of this nation, from the origins of the colonies to the signing of the Declaration of Independence. So much is unknown of what lies beyond the dam burst.

In Washington, DC, there's much the same feeling, of watching a swelling build up behind a human-constructed barrier. There's so much pushing against that wall right now. So much greed and corruption and crime and so, so many lies. The Republican party is praying that the barrier holds, the dam they've constructed of media and power and manipulation. For if it breaks, the streets of DC will be clogged with floating, drowned corpses, like so many turds in a giant toilet.

[shin]

Hate the Lie, Hate the Liars:
Here's some festive quotes fer ya:
"[N]ot a single person who works for him seems to have the honor to leave himself."

"[N]one of his staff, no member of his administration, and almost no...official seems to want to hold the president truly accountable for his actions."

"re there no honorable men around him? Can his staff and cabinet be lied to without consequence? Is there nothing that will impel them to depart? They need not become vociferous critics of the president. They need not denounce him. A quiet, principled leave-taking would suffice. But it would be refreshing if one of them refused to be complicit any longer in the ongoing lie that is the...White House. Apparently, not one of them is willing to do that."

"Personal loyalty is an admirable trait, and so is political loyalty. Up to a point. Government officials work for the nation, not simply for the president. They swear an oath to the Constitution, not to the president. To remain loyal to a president who lies is to make oneself complicit in his lies. To remain loyal to a man who has brought shame to his office is to make oneself complicit in that shame. At some point, blind loyalty must yield to principled honor. When?"

All the quotes are from William Kristol, editor of The Weekly Standard, from his editorial in the August 31, 1998 issue titled "Where Are the Resignations?" Kristol was second to none in his outrage over Bill Clinton's lie to the American people, demanding that Clinton resign, fluffing that impeachment hard-on like the frantic young lover of a Viagra-less eighty-year old man.

Kristol was on ABC's This Week during the lead-up to and during the impeachment of Clinton, beating the drum that if Clinton lied, he should go; that once a President looks directly at the American people and lies, then that President is no longer effective, and, certainly, that to commit perjury is to lead the nation down a path of immorality from which it may never recover. (Amazing the way conservatives define "immorality," no?)

Of course, one could say that Kristol doesn't think that George W. Bush lied to the American people or at all, but at some point, it becomes pathetically foolish to believe that, like a teenager who won't give it up about Santa Claus. But Kristol is a desperate fuck these days, clinging to a disgraced ideology like a child-molesting priest reciting the "Hail Mary" in jail. When Kristol says that Tom DeLay, Scooter, and Turd Blossom did not act as criminals, when he says that the left is out to "criminalize conservatives," we are hearing the mad bleatings of the lamb about to be slaughtered, the horrible squeal of swine headed up the final ramp.

[shin]

It Must Suck To Be a Republican Senator Today:
Goddamn, just take a gander at the faces of Bill Frist and Lil' Ricky Santorum as Frist raged about Minority Leader Harry Reid's invocation of a rule that demanded a closed-door session of the Senate yesterday. Frist has the look of a man who has just been kicked in the nuts, who has been bitch-slapped by an angry pimp, who has been told that someone took his favorite stool at the bar. And Lil' Ricky's just standin' there with the sad-puppy look of someone who knows he's gonna fuckin' lose his seat. Meanwhile, the malevolent Trent Lott oozes in the background, wondering if he should twist Reid's shiv in Frist's ribs. Don't you just sport wood or get all gooey wet listenin' to Frist attempt to re-attach his ballsack like the good surgeon he is?

In many, many ways, it's gotta fuckin' suck to be part of the majority right now, especially in the Senate. 'Cause, see, the Republicans have nearly all the power, and many, many of the people who put them there a year ago are now sittin' up and thinkin', "What the fuck?" Because with the war bein' a snowball rollin' down a clear mountain, with the cave to the religious right on the Supreme Court, with the indictment of Scooter, with the surfacing into the mainstream media of the slime-covered Peter Lorre-like visage of Karl Rove, with this and so, so much else, the American public is, more and more, asking, "Ummm, what are you hiding? And why are you trying so fuckin' hard to hide it?" Or perhaps, "What are you Republicans afraid of?"

There's unequivocal statements conflicting with reality here. If the President says he'll get rid of anyone in the White House "who had anything to do" with the leak of a covert CIA agent's name, and then he doesn't fire someone who admitted that he leaked the name, that doesn't really leave much wriggle room, right? If the President says that, without a doubt, Saddam Hussein has WMDs and then we learn that, without a doubt, he didn't, that bears some investigation, no? You're either a man of your word or you're just a fuckin' liar, and that simple choice and its simple answer has now bled through to the public at large.

As any good mob enforcer who's dropped a squealer in cement shoes into the Narrows between Staten Island and Brooklyn knows, eventually the ropes or chains holding onto them will rot or rust away, the flesh will decay and loosen from the bucket, and what you want to stay hidden will surface. The question is how much distance, in time and space, can you put between you and that bobbing corpse. And what Harry Reid and Dick Durbin did yesterday was to pull the car over and force the Republicans to at least admit that there's something missing.

'Cause - and what really sucks about being Republican right now - crime is crime and lies are lies, no matter which party is in power. Republicans in Congress have been trapped by the Bush administration: if they really begin to look at how we got into the Iraq war, they're gonna alienate the White House, which will turn on them with a viciousness generally ascribed to starving hyenas finding a wounded antelope; but if they don't have hearings, and have them soon, the public will remember this in 2006 and hasta la vista. (And if you're a moderate Republican, the intensity is doubled when it comes to a Supreme Court nominee who your own constituents wouldn't want you to support.) One doesn't have to have complete faith in the citizens of this country to believe that, since Katrina, since 2000 dead, attention is being paid in a way that one wishes it had been, say, a year ago.

So when Bill Frist huffed and puffed to the microphones yesterday, declaring the Democrats' action as a "stunt" (which, of course, raised the question, "And the Terri Schivo vote was what now?"), what we got to witness was the thrashings about of the trapped man, the pinned moth fluttering desperately, the idiot lost in the maze that he himself helped construct.

[shin]

Bannin' Books, Kansas-Style:
You need a larf in these tragic times? You need a little political sorbet to cleanse the mental palate as the mindboggling parade of scandals, from Duke Cunningham to more Rove to whatever the fuck is going on with Iraq, starts to get to ya? Then click on over to the website for the Overland Park, Kansas group, "Citizens for Literary Standards in Schools," and get ready to double over, 'cause it's a motherfuckin' blast.

See, the group of parents, which calls itself, it seems, "CLaSS," (or, more, properly, "classKC") wants to bring "decency" back to the required reading materials for students in the Blue Valley district. The coolest part of the site? Why, CLaSS provides a list of offending passages from each of the books it wants banned. No more do the students, hands grimy and unwashed after masturbation, have to underline and giggle at the bad words. CLaSS has done the works for them. Wanna know where the narrator talks about her vagina in Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings? CLaSS helpfully provides it.

And, look, CLaSS gives a list of all the dirty words in Tim O'Brien's Going After Cacciato: "bitch, shit, Jesus Christ, fuckin’, bastard, for Christ sake, Jesus, son of a bitch, shitting, fucking, good shit, shit, sorry ass, happy-assed, bad shit, piss tube, shitter, shithead, fucker, dink, gook." Notice the nuance there: "fucking" is different from "fuckin'." It's the kind of post-structuralist ellision of meaning that'd do Gilles Deleuze proud. (And, yes, racism offends CLaSS, but it's certainly an afterthought to a "good shit.") Oh, and CLaSS lists the violence of this novel about, well, fuck, the Vietnam War.

Once upon a time, in a school district in a Southern state, the Rude Pundit's mother was the secretary to the Superintendent of Schools. This was back in the 1970s, when a large majority of citizens actually believed that teachers and educators were best qualified to decide what was the proper way to ensure that students were learning. This was when declaring war on public schools was seen as a product of either fringe ideology or wealthy elitism. Of course, even in these enlightened times, movements would get under way for something that stuck in the craw of the Christian right.

In this case it was a book, Catcher in the Rye, with its copious use of "goddamn" (186 times), its failure to condemn prostitutes, and its six uses of the word "fuck" (numbers courtesy of the CLaSS website), that got the rabble a-rumblin' for its ban from the classrooms of the county. Rude Mom told stories of the Superintendent standing up to the upset parents for he knew this to be true: they did not represent what most of the kids cared about, nor did they represent what the teachers cared about, nor did they represent what most of the parents cared about; they only represented what they cared about, and that was moral purity, man, against all this hippie-influenced open-mindedness. He also knew that to let them get a foot into the door of the classroom was to let them burst in and "fuck" check the libraries of the school district.

The Super stood firm, against protests and angry letters, calls, threats, and more. And the school board backed him, for he stayed Super for the next eight years.

In Kansas, the Blue Valley school district gave in and removed the book that had gotten the whole ball rolling, Tobias Wolff's memoir, This Boy's Life. The act, of course, empowered CLaSS to push for many more exchanges of "bad" books for "good" ones, like ones by Zane Grey, noted proponent of anti-violent conflict resolution, and, of course, by that teacher of good moral values, Mark Twain. So far the exchange has failed.

Of course, the motives of hypocrites and cowards are always easily revealed, and, as ever, the words "values" and "traditional" mean "Christian." 'Cause, like, in no realm of legitimate literary study are the works of, say, Catherine Marshall considered superior to the much-banned Toni Morrison. And, while violence in Vietnam is problemmatic for CLaSS, gore in the Civil and other wars is just dandy (check out the list for all the strangely violent works).

And, oh, ho, ho, we've all had a good liberal laugh at the fuck-tards from Kansas, haven't we? Ah, shit, how much we love ribbin' ol' creation-lovin', book-burnin' Kansas. Then you dig just a little further into the site, and you come across the section on "Blogs." And you read this: "[W]e believe that 'what you let your mind dwell on, you become' and 'garbage in, garbage out' are very apt statements. The profanity, obscenity and vulgarity that our children are bombarded with today from all directions easily become part of their everyday thoughts, conversations and actions. Therefore, classKC has decided to also 'shine the light' on what we believe are the many dangers of teen blogging (in particular, xanga) in our geographic area."

You look over the list of blogs of teenagers, of current and former Blue Valley High School students, and you see that everything is lumped in together, from the blogs of members of the band and cheerleaders and debate club, with the "Niggas In Blue Valley" blog ring, with the alumni blog, and you realize, in the pit of your gut that what the Super also realized long, long ago: it's about thought control, man.

And then the sorbet is done because you connect the fuckin' dots, between the parents of Overland Park, Kansas, the federal government spying on us, even the latest "let-me-see-your-I.D." movement in Miami, and you realize that those kids don't stand a fuckin' chance. 'Cause all they're gonna learn is that power can strip away rights indiscriminately, all under a mad rubric of "protection," from terrorists, from impure thoughts, from each other. And they're gonna learn it's just easier to give in than to fight it.

[shin]

Alito Tears:
Oh, sweet Martha-Ann Bomgardner, you who would not take the name of Alito as your own, come over here and dry your tears on the Rude Pundit's shoulder. Yes, yes, it is a shame that Sammy had to endure such harsh questions in his hearing, questions like "What do you think?" and "Did you mean it when you said?" and "Why did you do that?" It's so sad, isn't it, that big mean Ted Kennedy wanted to know why Sammy joined the Concerned Alumni of Princeton.

Shhhh, dear Martha-Ann, we all know that you sign up for groups to pad the resume', and, with Sammy applying for a job with the Meese Justice Department, any extra right wing padding would be welcomed. Hell, back in high school, the Rude Pundit briefly belonged to the 4-H Club so he could put it on his college apps. Then he realized he'd have to touch goats and chickens. And when Lindsay Graham sarcastically asked if Sammy was a "closet bigot," well, who could hold back the floodgates for all the implication? It's brutal, the Rude Pundit knows.

Aww, you cry so deliciously, poor Martha-Ann. The Rude Pundit bets that you cry more bravely than that ten-year old girl when she was strip-searched by cops as they probed her ten-year old vagina and anus for packets of drugs. The Rude Pundit bets that you cry more loudly than that retarded guy whose co-workers sodomized him with a broom handle. The Rude Pundit bets that the tears of everyone ever affected by your husband's decisions now and in the future pale in comparison to the tears that streak you face right now.

Hush, Martha-Ann, and let the Rude Pundit comfort you. Let the Rude Pundit love you and make love to you. Cry again when you come. And if you should get pregnant, remember that your husband isn't on the Supreme Court yet.

[sisyphus]

just lurking and laughing my ass off.....and feeling slightly guilty about it....and then forgiving myself....