The Grinch who trashed marriage

A sixteen year old boy begins a sexual relationship with his twenty-four year old teacher. He marries her three years later. As an adult he routinely lies about their early relationship, telling all who’d listen that they met when he was eighteen.

The boy becomes an educated man over fifteen years of marriage. He embarks on a risky, high-profile career. Then he meets someone else. He's now thirty-four years old. Instead of a wife eight years his senior, his new love is eight years younger than he. He asks this new woman to marry him after knowing her for just a few weeks, and before even telling his wife. Her notice arrives as divorce papers, served to her in a hospital bed, where she's  recuperating after cancer surgery. Cancer and divorce will leave her destitute.

The man discovers a confidant and professional ally in his second wife. She is a friend, advisor and coach all in one loyal spouse. His vaulting ambition is finally realized during their marriage. He achieves national fame and influence but his own hubris ultimately poisons the well of good fortune. He loses his job, is nearly bankrupted, suffers clinical depression and wallows in public displays of self-destructive behavior. She sticks with him through the worst of times and provides a modifying influence, laying the groundwork for his resurrection.

Then he meets someone else. This time it's a woman twenty-three years his junior. After eighteen-years of marriage he tells his second wife it's over – by telephone. She had been recently diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. He behaves badly in the otherwise uncontested divorce proceedings. She remains loyal after the dust settles,  maintaining her silence about a very public figure.

Until now.

If this man was less known, our morality tale wouldn’t compel much consideration. Many middle-aged men have been known to treat their wives as disposable commodities. If this man were an ordinary politician the story would still suffer a dearth of uniqueness. However, the man in this story is an out-spoken, conservative defender of family values. He’s been a national champion of the conservative cause for three decades, a strident voice defending the sanctity of marriage.

And now he wants to be President of the United States.

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Read the in-depth profile in Esquire.

Watch Colbert go to town.

Lunacy in better focus

Glenn Beck's use of the racially coded phrase "Planet of the Apes"  in yet another of his idiotic rants caused the TheRaven to ponder his target audience.

Congressmen Bob Inglis' remarkable interview with Mother Jones revealed a genuine conservative's perspective on the Tea Party. Inglis is the real deal. He's about as far from liberal as you can be without crossing the line on delusionalism. He offers a compelling case for the Tea Party as a collection of crack-brained wing-nuts.

The very next day another piece has fallen into place. This post on AlterNet is reporting that a Massive Censorship at Digg has been uncovered. Digg is the leading social media website.As reported on AlterNet:

"A group of nearly one hundred conservatives have banded together on a Yahoo Group called Digg Patriots, and a companion site at coRanks to issue bury orders and discuss strategies to censor Digg and other social media websites. Digg Patriots was founded on 21 May 2009. This group is the heart of a complicated web on various networks, including Twitter, Propeller, StumbleUpon, YouTube, and Facebook, all dedicated to ramming an extreme right wing viewpoint down the throats of those communities and censoring opposing viewpoints. 

This includes such means as cyber stalking, bullying, and terror, as exposed on YouTube yesterday (something not one of the Digg Patriots group condemned).  Not surprisingly, there is also a heavy contingent active on the ultraconservative FreeRepublic.There are a few differences of opinion within Digg Patriots, although for the most part, they are extremely similar in perspective.

• They hate Obama. 
• They hate progressives. 
• They hate the UN, diplomacy, and peace/disarmament efforts. 
• They hate reforms of health care, Wall St., and immigration. 
• They hate science, in fact many are creationists, and some even blog about it.
• They hate the secular nature of our nation. 
• They hate environmental protection, requiring polluters to be responsible for their own cleanup, and especially hate climate efforts. 
• They hate unions and any attempt to level the playing field to give all Americans economic opportunities. 
• They hate the government, except the military-industrial complex. 
• They hate abortion rights. 
• They hate public schools and really hate higher education. 
• They hate anyone in the media except far right personalities like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, and Michelle Malkin. 
• They hate anyone who doesn’t think Obama is a secret islamist and/or marxist who was born in Kenya. 
• They just love to hate.

Although this is a fringe group of Teabagging wingnuts, many well established figures in the Digg community are also present..."

The only thing worse than wing-nuts is well-organized wing-nuts. A tip of the hat to the folks at Digg who ferreted out this nonsense and put a stop to it.

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UPDATE 1: TheAtlantic discusses an idea that may seem radical to right-wing extremists: we are each entitled to our own set of opinions, but we aren't entitled to our own set of facts. Abandonment of truth in the Internet age is yet another manifestation of the Law of Unintended Consequences. The Atlantic piece opens with Alternet's discovery of Tea Party trolls carrying on like Grant's wolves. Read all about it, here.