Colin McEnroe | To Wit

You Stay Classy ...and Gay, San Diego

Here is the mayor of San Diego announcing his decision not to veto a gay marriage bill.  Better he and his family than the grasping, sneaky, Janus-faced Cheney clan, who have (Mary included) played the lesbian issue like a pinball machine.

But I'm a little flummoxed by the mayor's emotional state. Why so ferklempt?  Does he just feel deeply moved, in a good way, doing the right thing? Is he still in a spin from a come-to-Jesus session with his daughter? Is he wrenched by the herculean effort he made to get past his natural aversion to the idea of gay marriag?  (It doesn't seem like that long a trip from his prior civil unions stance.)

I'd like to think it's some version of the first, that the mayor, having decided to put his conscience ahead of politics, is just bowled over by how rich and good that feels.

The Short Goodbye

People are often quite insistent about handing you the keys that unlock their cabinets.

Even in the cramped confines of his two-minute resignation speech, Alberto Gonzales managed to shoot up a little signal flare to anyone interested in following it.

"I often remind our fellow citizens that we live in the greatest country in the world, and that I have lived the American dream. Even my worst days as attorney general have been better than my father's best days," he said.

What?

No context was provided for this remark. Pablo Gonzales was a construction worker in Houston. He was also, according to his son, a drunk.

My father had a terrible drinking problem. He was an alcoholic, and there were many nights when I remember him coming home and, you know, severe arguments with my mother and throwing the pillow over my head and just trying to not listen to all of that. I mean, unfortunately, those happened way too often. But one story I do like to tell about my father is, no matter how much he drank on a particular night, if it was a work day the next morning, he was always up and he was always gone to provide for his family, so I learned that lesson very early on. But, you know, in that respect, I mean there were some difficult times in my family.

I think this has a lot to do with the way Gonzales and Bush found each other. Bush is a self-celebrated ex-drunk. He's the dream Gonzales had about his own father -- that the man would clean up his act and become a responsible parent, a parent worth saving.

It's probably why Gonzales has put so many other natural concerns (such as "Why is Karl being allowed to run my department?") aside to serve this president. And even though Gonzales has been humiliated and hung out to, so to speak, dry, he has been happier than his father, because his mortification and ruin have been allowed to unfold in an alcohol-free environment.

And yes, that's a very sad goodbye.

You Set Whose What on Fire Now?

We should all try to get along.

If you don't take care of your stuff ...

You must be so sick of the NYC stuff. Even so, here is today's column. Thanks to Jude at scenicroot for the kind words.

Here We Go Again

Why is it, I once asked Thomas Moore (the Care of the Soul guy), that when you see some new American Inquisitor attempting to impose his or her stern, sexual morality on the rest of the public, you can pretty much flip over the hourglass and watch the sand trickle for a short while before the Inquisitor's own moral implosion? Jim Bakker, Laura Schlessinger, Jimmy Swaggart, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Bennett, Ted Haggard, on and on runs the unbroken line. And today we add U.S. Sen. David Vitter. (Actually, you kind of have to give Joe Lieberman a little credit for drawing a bright line between his spotless personal life and his richly detailed intellectual fraudulence.)

Moore's answer to me:  Those people have already acknowledged the tremendous power that venal and carnal material has over them.

It's one of the smartest things anybody has ever said to me.

A few things to note about the Vitter affair:

a.) Rudy has shown his usual unerring knack for sniffing out a bird of his feather! This guy makes a nifty bookend to Bernard Kerik screwing Judith Regan in the apartment designated for tired 9/11 rescue workers.     AP Photo

b.) There apparently were preceding chapters to this one and there maybe a rather thrilling next installment.  Greenwald has quite a bit of detail on this. The next installment is suggested here:                                             

Asked by an interviewer in 2000 whether she could forgive her husband if she learned he'd had an extramarital affair, as Hillary Clinton and Bob Livingston's wife had done, Wendy Vitter told the Times-Picayune: "I'm a lot more like Lorena Bobbitt than Hillary. If he does something like that, I'm walking away with one thing, and it's not alimony, trust me."

(Presumably the generous Senate health plan covers reattachment. If Wendy doesn't go all Doug Mientkiewicz with her trophy.)

The overarching context can be seen here:

So, to recap: in Louisiana, Vitter carried on a year-long affair with a prostitute in 1999. Then he ran for the House as a hard-core social conservative family values candidate, parading around his wife and kids as props and leading the public crusade in defense of traditional marriage.

Then, in Washington, he became a client of Deborah Palfrey's. Then he announced that amending the Constitution to protect traditional marriage was the most important political priority the country faces. Rush Limbaugh, Fred Thompson and Newt Gingrich supported the same amendment.

As always, it is so striking how many Defenders of Traditional Marriage have a record in their own broken lives of shattered marriages, multiple wives and serial adultery. And they never seek to protect the Sacred Institution of Traditional Marriage by banning the un-Christian and untraditional divorces they want for themselves when they are done with their wives and are ready to move on to the next, newer model. Instead, they only defend these Very Sacred Values by banning the same-sex marriages that they don't want for themselves.

Beccause they have already acknowledgede the tremedous power dissolution exerts over them

My Package

I think I might be, like, cool or something.

Paging Dr. Freud! Or...Happiness Is a Warm ...

If you had any doubt that the invasion of Iraq was "triggered" at least partly by George W. Bush's untreated thicket of psychological issues related to his father -- pretty much the classic paradoxical melange of wanting both to protect Dad and triumph over him -- consider this:  he keeps the severed penis of his father's chief rival in his office. Well, symbolically. Sometimes a pistol is just a pistol. Not this time. Not when you have attempted to "rescue" and  diminish your father in one fell swoop using the might of the American military.  (In retrospect, buying the baseball team was the first sign of unresolved Oedipal conflict.  All those sticks and balls.)

Most of us dealt with these issues, gradually, even glacially, in therapy.  He took a slightly different route: alcohol, coke, fanatical religious conversion, getting the job Dad lost, killing the guy who tried to kill Dad, getting thousands and thousands of other people killed in the process and dragging the United States down into an abyss of torture and imperialism and international repudiation.

You know what? If he achieved some inner peace, it was totally worth it.

(Thank you, G. Papp Sr.)

Someone to watch over me

Love was waiting right under his nose. Way down there.

J&E

Sorry about the early Politico-triggered mix-up. Not a great day for that brand name.

The press conference itself ..well, could they possibly be more likeable? Especially Elizabeth? In a strange way, it may have loaded up the Edwards campaign with  a peculiar rocket fuel made of sorrow and hope. The way she says -- and pretty whole-heartedly means -- that he is the best man for America is worth about 80 campaign commercials.

Sad news

This is the bad news we've been anticipating all day, and the first thing we can all do is send prayers and good thoughts.   May there be peace in Elizabeth's heart.

As for the candidate, he is doing the right thing, as he and Elizabeth see it. They have a long history of meeting tragedy with resilience. And it will have the odd effect of creating a standard few others can meet in a tangled field of bad marriages, divorces, adulteries and separate bedrooms.  He's always seemed to me like a pretty good man, as politicians go, and this does nothing to change that.

The Tao Te Ching tells us:

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

I hate to be this cynical, but today's sore thumb is Gingrich, who actually divorced his wife  while she was sticken with cancer.

The Tao Te Ching tells us:

What is a good man but a bad man's teacher?
What is a bad man but a good man's job?