I had intended a retrospective on 2010 – Chilean miners, Russian spies, Oil spills – but ruminating on the Flash Crash or the Ground Zero Mosque at this point, considering the gravity of the shootings in Tucson and the paradigm shattering events in the mid-East would only serve to evoke some desperate and creepy nostalgia like getting caught jerking off to faded images of Janice Kapinski in my high school yearbook. Nonetheless, there are some timeless themes that derive from events of the past year.

1) Let the marital dissolutions visited upon Sandra Bullock, Eva Longoria and Tipper Gore serve to remind that no manner of public adoration, professional achievement or financial stature can overcome the curse of small tits when it comes to keeping your man.

2) If this ataxic economy has spawned idealized images of robbing your neighborhood 7-11, know this: while the criminal justice system occasionally fails – sometimes glaringly so – often enough the scales are eventually righted. In some instances the guilt-plagued perpetrators themselves are driven to append (O.J. Simpson) or reproduce (Joran Van der Sloot) their unpunished crimes. For others (Tom DeLay), the courts eventually wend their way to an apt, if torturously protracted, verdict. In the absence of either (Sen. Ted Stevens), there remains an off chance that the hand of God will flick you off this mortal coil by means of a sudden and horrible death. And keep in mind, as you mull your next feasible delictum, there’s no appellate process with option three.

It would be my custom, at this juncture, to castigate those who lay blame for the Arizona killings at the foot of the mental health system. Admittedly, warning signs were in no short supply in the troubled life of Jared Lee Loughner, but the fact remains that it was a loaded gun that afforded Mr. Loughner the ability to wreak so much damage. I would venture that had he attempted to assassinate Congresswoman Giffords with a candlestick or piece or rope, he would have been stomped to death long before inflicting the level of damage that was so sadly achieved on January 8th. I would have said as much, mind you, save for the fact that, only weeks later, 23-year-old Maskim Gelman proved, in the span of one day’s time, the possibility of killing four New Yorkers and hospitalizing several others wielding nothing but a knife and a 1995 Pontiac Bonneville.

With Eminem pimping for Chrysler, the UAW handing out $4,000 bonus checks and GM issuing a record setting IPO, one could argue that the auto industry bailout was a reasonable decision in the midst of a massive economic meltdown. Though far from thriving, Detroit is showing a pulse – sales figures and accolades paint the Chevy Volt as the greatest thing since electricity – unlike the Democrats who remain feckless and jelly-spined in the face of another (see: 1994) Republican takeover.

It has been widely known for years that House Speaker John Boehner (R–OH) is a habitual inebriate. Yet only now do we discover, via The National Enquirer, that Mr. Boner also has a thirst for the ladies, with at least two women (Is this what Sarah Palin meant by “Drill, baby, drill”?) identified as paramours. And if you find yourself doubting the veracity of a publication that claims Elvis is helming a fleet of UFOs set to conquer Earth, it might help to know The New York Times was on the verge of printing a similar article on the eve of the November elections before chickening out. But that’s what liberals do; they pussy out. Even after 60 Minutes broadcast the Speaker whimpering incomprehensively like a febrile infant, there was nary a whisper from the left questioning his mental status if not his fitness to serve as the nation’s third highest ranking elected official. Newt Gingrich, on the other hand, had no qualms investigating President Clinton’s dalliances while in the midst of his own extra-marital affair. The former Speaker, you may recall, was playing the family values card while serving divorce papers to his cancer stricken wife. Now that’s ballsy.

If the shoe were on the other foot, you could bet your bottom dollar that impeachment hearings would be well under way: two arch-conservative Supreme Court Justices, Scalia and Thomas, failed to recuse themselves from a campaign finance case (Citizens United vs. Federal Election Commission) after attending a fundraiser sponsored by an affiliate of the plaintiff. Though a court spokesperson claimed that Scalia did not attend and Thomas merely dropped by, Thomas’ own financial disclosure report noted reimbursements for four days of “transportation, meals and accommodations.” What these documents did omit, however, was the $686,589 paid over five years by the Heritage Foundation to Thomas’ wife, Virginia.

The bottom line is that Justices are subject to the conflict rules contained in 28 U.S.C. §455(a), which requires a judge or justice to “disqualify himself in any proceeding in which his impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Moreover, the Judicial Code of Conduct states that, “a judge should not personally participate in fund-raising activities, [or] make speeches for a political organization . . . or attend [an] event sponsored by a political organization or candidate.” While the pall of Bush vs. Gore established a blatant disregard for these rules, the Citizens United case might have a residual impact: because the Court ruled that corporate (read:Koch brothers) funds could be directly spent on election advertising, Obama’s days may well be numbered. In which case, we can look forward to another president with half the brain function of Gabrielle Giffords.

This Holiday Season, given the slanted shadows of terrorism, avian flu and tortured, strike-induced reruns of “John from Cincinnati” and “Cop Rock,” you’d be well served to reflect on your relationship with God, to recommit your stewardship of the environment (picture a bearded, corpulent, red-suited Al Gore ripping down your neighbor’s Christmas lights) and to rekindle your love for your fellow man.  At the same time, it is awfully handy to carry around a 2×4 with protruding nails so you can bludgeon that son of a bitch who’s trying to kipe your parking place at the mall.  Doesn’t he know how desperate you are to snag the last extant box of Aqua Dots before Janice from accounting samples the office eggnog?

And if you find nothing else in your stocking but a lump of coal, you can be grateful that the president finally,finally got something right. W deftly kept Thanksgiving airline snafus to a bare minimum this year by increasing the minimum compensation due to “bumped” ticket holders, allowing commercial aircraft to wantonly occupy military airspace and freeing TSA screeners from the burdensome task of keeping bombs off of planes. According to a recent report by the Government Accountability Office, security lines are palpably shorter, if only due to the fact that undercover agents have been more likely than not to smuggle aboard detonators, explosives and liquid incendiary devices.  Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) fumed, “in spite of billions of dollars and the six years the TSA has had to deploy new technology and procedures, our airlines remain vulnerable.”  True, but given our track record in Iraq (billions, years, abject failure) what else should we expect?   And while the administration’s domestic security advisor, Frances Townsend, was forced to resign in disgrace, TSA Assistant Administrator Ellen Howe remains indignant:  this isn’t exactly “news to us,” she allowed. “We don’t change security procedures in knee-jerk fashion.”   Well that’s comforting.  Yet there is a silver lining in the cloud of getting blown to smithereens at 37,000 feet; you no longer need wrestle with the moral dilemma of whether or not to eat the cobbler off the tray next to you.

Otherwise, it’s business as usual:  O.J.’s in the dock, Natalee Holloway continues to be dead and televangelists are, as always, mired in scandal. Richard Roberts, for one, stepped down as president of Oral Roberts University amid allegations he pilfered school funds for personal use. A former accountant claims that Roberts ordered him to falsify financial documents and that Roberts spent $123,000 of ministry funds to remodel his home.  Roberts also stands accused of various other forms of profligacy — like buying a stable of race horses — before God personally told him to resign: “Every ounce of my flesh” said stay, he admitted, but “the Lord said, ‘don’t do that.’ ”  And I’m inclined to believe him, because shortly thereafter the school received a $70 million pledge from Mart Green, the founder of an Oklahoma City Christian office and educational supply store chain.  Praise Jesus!

And praise Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) for bringing the investigative prowess of the Senate Finance Committee to bear on six mega-churches and their free spending ministers, including the likes of Benny Hinn, Kenneth Copeland and Crefelo Dollar.  The IRS, noted the Senator, could revoke these churches’ tax-exempt status if it determined that the pastors’ compensation exceeded a “reasonable standard.”  It remains to be determined if all the fancy suits, ocean front homes and private jets fall under this rubric.  One government official commented that at first glance the spending seems patently excessive, but then much less so after considering that the Pope has his own fucking country.

And yet, for all that is predictable, the commonweal, often enough, resembles some kind of Bizarro land where presidents say things like: “When we talk about war, we’re really talking about peace.”  Where Rupert Murdoch plans to increase revenues by abolishing fees for on-line access to the Wall Street Journal. Where Valerie Plame is barred from disclosing her own CIA connections even though Karl Rove and columnist Robert Novak (at the direction, according to former White house Press Secretary Scott McClellan, of Messrs. Cheney and Bush themselves) were free to do so. No sooner had federal magistrate John D. Bates dismissed Ms. Plame’s civil lawsuit against the administration  — disclosing classified intelligence is apparently well “within the scope of defendants’ duties as high-level Executive Branch officials.” — than another, U.S. District Judge Barbara S. Jones, ruled that the former CIA operative could not publish the dates of her agency service in her book, “Fair Game: My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal at the White House.” Her honor reasoned, “The information at issue [while acknowledged to have appeared in the public domain] was properly classified and has not been officially acknowledged by the CIA.”  The twisted bookends on this Catch-22 are Scooter Libby, who was convicted yet turned loose, and New York Times writer Judith Miller who was incarcerated for not writing the story.

Nothing is more topsy-turvy, however, than the relationship between the dollar and the euro.  When introduced as a physical currency in 2002, the euro fetched around eighty-seven cents.  Now it commands nearly a dollar and a half.  In a sign of the times, Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen is demanding payment in euros while rapper Jay-Z flashes continental cheddar in his video “Blue Magic.”  Things have gotten so bad that a Libertarian outfit in Indiana outfit began minting silver Ron Paul dollars before federal agents recently shut them down. As of this writing, it remains unclear how much of the Republican presidential candidate’s one-day record of $4 million in campaign contributions consisted of his own illegal tender. Nonetheless, it is difficult to fathom such a precipitous decline in the greenback given the lack of innovation and productivity found in Euroland. The French, for example, enjoy a 35-hour workweek, two months of vacation and a capital laid to siege every time some overcompensated public works employee grumbles about his pension.  American entrepreneurs, by way of contrast, have cleverly figured out how to multiply your inability to keep up with the resets on your adjustable rate mortgage into a massive global financial crisis.  Now that’s ingenuity.

The office of the Vice President is vehemently denying that Mr. Cheney petitioned Israel to launch air strikes on a suspected Iranian nuclear installation so that U.S. forces could respond to the anticipated Iranian retaliation by duly commencing World War III. Meyrav Wurmser of the neoconservative Hudson institute averred that her husband David, Cheney’s former Middle East advisor, was spuriously misquoted by Newsweek and that the scheme was blown way out of proportion. Truth be told, she allowed, a minyon of Hasidic rabbis from Washington Heights were recruited to kidnap President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad during the Iranian leader’s speech at Columbia University. After bludgeoning Mr. Ahmadinejad around the head and torso with two kosher salamis and a stale bialy, they would take him, hooded and chained, to a CIA safe house on Long Island and ritualistically bathe (read: water board) him in an unsanitized Mikveh. From that point, she accedes, the details get rather murky.

Yet even after the diminished story broke, a spiral of escalation and accusation nonetheless flowed, no doubt warming the veep’s artificially paced heart. Two weeks ago Thursday, U.S. forces in northern Iraq detained Iranian national Mahmudi Farhadi, claiming him a central figure in Iran’s shipments of sophisticated weapons — “RPG-29s, explosively-formed penetrators (EFPs), 240 mm rockets and Misagh-1 surface-to-air missiles” — across the border. Yahya Rahim Safavi, an advisor to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei and former commander of the Revolutionary Guards, offered this bellicose retort: “We are closely watching the foreigners’ moves in neighboring countries by highly advanced satellite technology. Our missile industry is in very good shape. Americans should know that their 200,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq are in Iran’s range.”

That Joan Rivers didn’t like his dress — “gauzy, confused, smelly” — doesn’t alter the fact that Osama Bin Laden’s latest Emmy-award winning video distinctly captures the zeitgeist that Islamic terrorists, given this latest sequence of events, might, were it not for Al Gore’s photographs of iceless polar caps, reign unchallenged as the reason not to get out of bed this year. Yet the red carpet is red for a reason. And that’s because the far more perilous and immediate threat to the commonweal is China.

The Chinese economy has been growing at 12% a year, mostly, it now seems, on the back of exporting industrial waste cleverly repackaged as deadly consumer products. And while the balance of trade is clearly tipping in their favor, they seem to harbor an inexplicable contempt for our children and pets. Earlier this year, you’ll recall, scores of American dog food brands were shelved after melamine and cyanuric acid (a chemical used in cleaning pools) were discovered in batches of wheat gluten and rice protein concentrate imported from China. According to veterinary scientists, use of such chemicals does make these ingredients appear to have a higher level of protein, although it is distinctly incompatible with Fido staying right side up.

Soon after the Michael Vickification of our canine population, waves of Chinese-made products began plaguing our kids. Millions of toys, books and coloring sets flooded our shores with toxic levels of lead paint, tarnishing in their wake such well-loved brands as Sponge Bob, Dora the Explorer and Thomas the Tank Engine. Other toys were suffused with super-strong magnets (like those comprising Stanford’s linear accelerator), which, if swallowed in pairs, could tear through a child’s intestines. And for those infants too young to succumb to such temptations, collapsing cribs provided ample treachery. A million Chinese-manufactured Simplicity and Graco units were recently recalled after several baby deaths. Yet despite overwhelming circumstantial evidence to the contrary, some pundits continue to insist that the Chinese are not compelled by hatred or ideology; rather they are driven purely by reckless profiteering, which makes them less like terrorists and more like, well, Republicans. Some exporters, surprisingly, have shown remorse. The owner of Lee Dur Industrial committed suicide soon after his tainted Sesame Street toys were pulled off the market. Cheung Shu-hung (whose last name, thankfully, wasn’t Nocuous-bowel-irrigation) hung himself in the company’s warehouse. “When I rushed there,” reported an employee, “the police had already sealed off the area. I saw that our boss had two deep marks in his neck.”

Rope burns aside, the communist government wasn’t about to rely on such altruism in the case of Zheng Xiaoyu, former director of the State Food and Drug Administration. Zheng was recently executed for taking bribes in exchange for approving six fake drugs, one of which killed at least 10 citizens. Meanwhile, our former FDA chief, Dr. Lester M. Crawford, got a measly three years probation after pleading guilty to conflict of interest and false writing charges for failing to disclose stock ownership of companies (e.g. Embrex, Sysco, Pepsi) subject to FDA regulation. I gather the court chose to overlook the pantheon of widely used killer drugs like Vioxx and Propulcid (or over-the–counter pediatric cough syrup) that stayed on the market far after the evidence beckoned for withdrawal. Or, perhaps, to ignore the cornucopia of potentially effective drugs that are for political reasons kept away from consumers.

The Plan B contraceptive is a case in point. Finally approved last year, the “morning after” pill was repeatedly corralled by Dr. David Hager, a Bush appointed member of the FDA Advisory Committee on Reproductive Health. Hager is an evangelical Christian and licensed gynecologist who authored several books (e.g. As Jesus Cared for Women) in which he railed against emergency contraception, abortion and premarital sex. He did, however, advocate “reading scripture [presumably Exodus 14:21 — parting of the red sea] to treat PMS.” He also advocated anally raping his wife. Linda Carruth Davis, his former wife of thirty-two years, suffered form narcolepsy and in the main was helpless against his prurient advances. But even were wifey awake, Hager would often “accidentally migrate” from vaginal to anal sex, citing an inability to “feel the difference.” (This is not, I would hazard, what you want to discover about your gynecologist as you’re “stirrups up” for a pap smear.) “I probably wouldn’t have objected so much or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal sex all the time,” she mused, “but it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [sodomy] that was so horrible.” Amen.

Answer me this: With the Beijing Olympics around the corner, why the fuck would the Chinese (the Drug Enforcement Agency estimates that 99% of illegal steroids are formulated with chemicals obtained from China) fortify our athletes with massive amounts of performance enhancing drugs? They have to know that after the Floyd Landis debacle, we Americans have learned, if nothing else, how to better mask our blood chemistry. And perhaps why we (again, still?) hate the French. Nonetheless, U.S. authorities last week busted up a rather expansive steroid production and distribution ring making over 120 arrests and seizing $6.5 million in cash along with the requisite weapons and “cooking utensils.” Police conducted similar raids in Denmark, Germany, Australia, Belgium, Sweden and Thailand. Chinese Gymnasts, therefore, need only consider the Russians and Guatemalans as serious impediments to a rigged medal count. I can only imagine what Dick Cheney might want to do about that.

Contrary to published reports, my last twelve months were not spent undercover with special ops forces in Iraq. Call me a coward, but I failed to see the value in trading my limbs for a bundle of ribbons and an endless string of appointments at the VA hospital. Nor was I toiling in the Ninth Ward rebuilding churches and elementary schools. My story is far less noble than that. And while I’m not at liberty to divulge my exact whereabouts, I can reveal that I was sequestered at a rehab clinic in Malibu. Which is not exactly a dead giveaway as the tiny seaside hamlet (100 sq. mi., 14,000 residents) harbors over two dozen facilities, including such Hollywood favorites as Passages, Promises, Harmony Place, Malibu Horizon, Cliffside Malibu, Sunset Malibu and Irv’s Junkie Grotto.

What goes on in rehab is supposed to stay there; a first-name-only policy among the glitterari, however, fails to provide much in the way of anonymity. Nonetheless, I don’t feel I’m betraying any confidentiality by sharing some of what I learned. One patient, let’s call him “Mel”, taught me how to stumble my way through a field sobriety test after running over a clutch of elderly Jews, while “Britney” and “Lindsay”, ever mindful of the paparazzi, cautioned me, just before a moonlight foray to score some coke, to re-shave my pussy before scaling the perimeter wall.

Admittedly, after a full year inside, I was as reluctant to leave said clinic as I was to enter it in the first place. For all the limitations like second-rate Frappucinos and starchy, Jackson Pollock-stained prison linens, rehab was a safe haven, devoid of triggers, enablers and ex-wives. The outside world seemed capricious if not downright pernicious and it was going to take a higher force to get me out the door. Yet it was not completing my twelve steps or accepting L. Ron Hubbard as my lord and savior that provided the necessary animus. What brought me back into society was the fact that Donald Trump could fire Rosie O’Donnell from “The View.” “Rosie’s a loser,” Trump sharply bristled, “and ‘The View’ will fail… Barbara [Walters] made a big mistake… Can you imagine the parents of [her girlfriend] when she said, ‘Mom, Dad, I just fell in love with a big fat pig named Rosie’?” The network took notice, duly kicking Rosie to the curb — and in the process showed me that the world once again made sense, that order can be restored.

Enter Whoopi Goldberg who in eight seconds had producers second-guessing their casting acumen when she defended Michael Vick’s dog fighting operation. “Dogs are sport… in the deep South,” she explained, “This is part of his cultural upbringing.” As commonplace, I suppose, as incest and hanging black folks from trees, yet no one’s clamoring to get those events included in the Beijing Olympics. And while the trail of dead wrestlers leading to Vince McMahon’s doorstep has yet to produce any arrests, Vick’s initial denials shows he knew his activities were nefarious and, more to the point, illegal. Because the Falcons’ quarterback was the last defendant to cop a plea, he has been suspended from the NFL and will soon be sentenced to jail. True justice would see Mr. Vick locked in a razor-wire pen with twenty rabid Pit Bulls and a syphilitic Rotweiller. Be that as it may, Vick’s attorney, by garnering for his client an outcome notably shy of the standard set by O.J. Simpson, might well expect a dearth of clientele. But that’s not the case as the litigator was only days ago hired by Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID) to fend off allegations of giving blowjobs in airport restrooms.

We should have been tipped off that Larry was a habitué of spankings and leather masks when, during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, he referred to Bill Clinton as “a nasty, bad, naughty boy.” Taking no such risk, Craig’s lawyer, Billy Martin, went straight to the shopworn Republican Fuck-I-Got-Caught playbook and predictably and blamed the media, in this case the Idaho Statesman newspaper which spent months investigating whether Craig is in fact a turd burglar, for precipitating a “state of intense anxiety” under which the Senator “felt compelled to grasp the lifeline [read: 7” uncut, shaved cock dripping with pre-cum] offered to him by the police officer” and to plead guilty to a single disorderly conduct charge in an effort to prevent the sordid episode from becoming public. As such, argued Martin, Craig’s guilty plea was not “knowingly and understandingly made” and should therefore be withdrawn. Claiming a lawmaker is ignorant of laws — especially those prohibiting public sex — is a baffling strategy and renders the legislator into the form of a scoutmaster discovered in flagrante with a young charge. Whether he immediately withdraws from the boy’s rectum or keeps on pumping away is immaterial. Either way he is unfit for the job. The prosecutor, for one, seems to agree: “Mr. Craig was arrested and signed a guilty plea, and from our standpoint, this case is already over.” But if by some miracle Craig is allowed to withdraw his plea, don’t fret; the government will no doubt re-file the dropped gross misdemeanor interference with privacy charge, which alleges Craig ogled the bathroom stall occupied by an undercover police officer.

Ironically, it’s Republicans who have urged Craig to resign. While they clearly wish to avoid another Mark Foley storyline, his resignation would more importantly obviate the need for a protracted and graphic Senate ethics committee investigation. Which, if you’ve ever seen one, — you probably haven’t, the last came in 1995, when Sen. Bob Packwood (R-OR) was found to have made 18 unwanted and unwelcome sexual advances — is quite a circus. Perhaps that’s why fellow senators David Vitter (R-LA) and Ted Stevens (R-AK), despite their numerous peccadilloes and offenses, have avoided such official scrutiny.

Vitter, a self-proclaimed family-values Christian conservative, admitted to a “very serious sin” after his phone number appeared on the client list of D.C. escort service. Yet his constituents continue to support him. Jeanette Maier of New Orleans proclaimed: “Sen. Vitter is one of the nicest and most honorable men I’ve ever met.” And she should know, doubtless encountering lots of men in her capacity as the madam of a high-end brothel shut down by federal authorities in 2002. Stevens, whose home was recently raided by FBI and IRS agents, is under investigation for receiving favors from an oil-services contractor in return for securing a $70mm government contract. The contractor, having extensively remodeled Stevens’ home and co-invested with the senator in a racehorse, has already pled guilty to bribing elected officials.

I cannot foretell whether any of the three senators will end up behind bars or anywhere else for that matter, but I do know this: at least one slot has opened up in rehab.

Go figure. Alberto Fernandez, a senior US State Department official, is fluent in, of all tongues, Arabic. By virtue of his unexpected linguistic aptitude, Sr. Fernandez landed an interview on al-Jazeera in which he let slip that in his esteemed judgment, “the hell and the killings in Iraq is linked to… arrogance and stupidity by the United States.” “Failure in Iraq, “ he added, “is a disaster for the region.” An embarrassed State Department quickly dispatched spokesman Sean McCormack, who refuted the Arab network by suggesting, “it is not an accurate quote.” To its decided disadvantage, the stuffy British Foreign Office could not bring itself to employ the now battle tested decoder ring defense when Chief of the General Staff General Richard Dannatt averred that the Brits “should get ourselves out [of Iraq] sometime soon because our presence exacerbates the security problems.” Recalling that whole Mission Accomplished business, Dannatt predicted, “history will show that the planning for what happened after the initial successful war fighting phase was poor, based more on optimism than sound planning.” If only the General had uttered his missive in obtuse Cockney collocation or unintelligible Jordy gibberish; but when it the Queen’s English all around there is simply nothing redactional parsing can do for the moribund Tony Blair.

Over here in the colonies, we, in the main, stick obligingly to the coarse pattern of blaming alcohol and sequestering ourselves in rehab, while the Continentals, at the same time, seem to favor more erudite apologias fashioned from the Tower of Babel. To wit: Russian President Vladimir Putin recently joked about sexual assault charges pending against Israeli President Moshe Katsav during a confab with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert: “Greetings to your president. What a powerful man he turns out to be! He raped 10 women. We all envy him.” Dmitry Peskov was summarily tasked with damage control: “Yes, these remarks were made, indeed. It’s a joke in Russian that actually does not reflect the automatic translation into English.” Perhaps more hilarious is the notion that only days after conducting a nuclear test, North Korea’s Kim Jong Il contritely told a Chinese delegation, “Sorry about the nuclear test. We have no plans for additional tests. If the U.S. makes some concessions to some degree, we will also make a concession to some degree, whether it be bilateral or six-party talks.” After the U.N. Security Council unanimously approved economic sanctions against Pyongyang, Chinese Foreign Ministry apparatchik Liu Jianchao declared, “These reports are inaccurate. I haven’t heard Kim apologizing.” In terms of the sanctions, offered Liu, “If other countries impose more pressure, [he] may take further steps.” North Korea went on to warn the South directly that joining the U.S. led embargo would lead to a “crisis of war.” Sorry, indeed.

Even pop star Madonna has suffered from the vagaries of idiomatic alchemy. The Material Girl endeavored to one up fellow single-moniker icon Bono and bestow upon Africa more than the trifles of sovereign debt relief and subsidized anti-viral drugs. Laudably, she went to Malawi to offer herself as surrogate mother to a black orphan. I guess the thousands of crack babies in Newark and Miami weren’t good enough, but in any event across the world she flew to the Lipunga orphanage only to discover that one-year-old David Banda indeed has a father. No matter, Madonna was nonetheless able to push an adoption through the courts despite protestations from international human rights organizations and Yohane Banda alike. “I cannot read,” admitted the distraught paterfamilias, “so I relied on what the [government] officials told me that the papers said; Madonna would look after the child the way the orphanage planned to educate him and then he comes back to me. I see no reason why my child should be given away forever. What we agreed [was in no way adoption, only] that she looks after my child until he finishes school.” I think there’s a word that describes a rich white Westerner plunging headlong into the deepest, darkest recesses of Africa for the purpose of deracinating a native from his village, cutting him off from his culture and dragging him across vast oceans under the yoke of subjugation. What’s that word, again? Oh yeah, slavery.

Unshackled by American custom, President Bush has adopted the continental proclivity of word shifting. Kind of like Carlos Castaneda meets Noah Webster. After telling George Stephanopoulos that his administration has “never been about stay the course” in Iraq, Mr. Bush stridently disavowed the 1,473 times he publicly pledged to “stay the course” during the past three years. Witness that as recently as August 17, White House mouthpiece Tony Snow declared, “you cannot be a president in a wartime and not realize that you’ve got to stay the course.” Of course Snow also circumlocuted that Cheney’s “no brainer” comment on water boarding was “taken out of context.” Perhaps, then, George Wallace’s “segregation forever” pledge was taken out of context, too. At any rate, only two weeks later, on August 30, W. told a Salt Lake City audience: “If we leave the streets of Baghdad before the job is done, we will have to face the terrorists in our own cities. We will stay the course.” After being confronted with videotape of the Utah speech, Mr. Bush quipped, “that wasn’t me; I never said that.”

If only defrocked Congressman Mark Foley could so easily purge the body of concupiscent text messages that flowed from his Blackberry. But, instead, Mr. Foley passed the buck to his former priest, Anthony Mercieca. Given the inherent similarities between anal beads and rosaries, conflating Jesus and a tight, young derriere seems almost unavoidable. Indeed, Rev. Tony admitted in an interview that he and the young Foley shared Greco-Roman saunas and nude massages and that he touched the then teenage boy “maybe once.” Mercieca expounded: “It’s not something you call, I mean, rape or penetration or anything like that.” The following day, however, the cleric issued a statement from his Maltese sanctuary, describing the various published iniquities as “exaggerated.” Remember, if we allow Bill Clinton to claim he somehow smoked without inhaling, it’s only fair that we let Mercieca assert he sucked without swallowing.

The larger issue, of course, is the fact that Archdiocese of Miami shuttled Rev. Anthony Mercieca through eight Florida parishes in his three and a half decades of service – a pattern that virtually signifies the Church’s overt suspicion of pedophilia. Not so, harrumphed the Archdiocese’s Mary Ross Agosta: “I can tell you there are no other allegations against him, there never has been. So the fact that he was transferred around is not because of claims of misconduct.” On the other hand, attorney Jeffrey Herman says his client, now 40, was also molested by Mercieca when he was about 12 years old. “He had been thinking about it… when Foley came out, he decided to come forward.” Herman continued, “He performed oral sex on the boy. He attempted on another occasion following altar boy practice, but the boy declined… and he never went back to the church after that.” I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of all these priests molesting little boys and then getting a slap on the wrist or maybe a year or two in the pokey. Why don’t we start nailing them to large wooden crosses and prop them up, bleeding and begging for mercy, near busy intersections or at shopping malls during the holiday rush? Maybe then we’ll remember what Christmas is supposed to be about.