Quid Nimis

Disclaimer: These abstracts are rated for the general reader and the ratings reflect internal consistency for Brijit's editorial policies.  The Quid Rating system is a bit more, tailored.  Nevertheless, all of these are worthwhile and some (Novak's piece, "Jena")  are very good.

Desert Castaways Get Second Life in Art Exhibition 

Valerie James collects the detritus she finds in the Arizona desert to make works of art. The state has become the main thoroughfare for migrants from Mexico entering the country illegally, and they litter the desert with trash and personal belongings, causing environmental problems and property damage. However, James sees a story in many of the items she finds in the sand, which inspires her to tell of the imagined lives, trials, and hopes of the migrants through collages and other mixed-media presentations. The accompanying slide show, depicting several of James' works, is eye-catching.
in The Wall Street Journal by Miriam Jordan, 17 January 2008
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Clinton's 'Vetting' Attack  

Novak picks up an interesting detail in Hillary Clinton's campaign rhetoric that is making Democratic insiders nervous and African-American Democrats angry. Her frequent use of the word "vetted," with respect to her qualifications, as opposed to the "unvetted" Barack Obama, conjures up the idea that Obama's admitted drug use in his teenage years is a part of a sketchy and unsavory past that would dog him in a general election. The racial overtones seem incidental: This could really be about Clinton resenting an obstacle in her road back to the White House.
in The Washington Post by Robert Novak, 17 January 2008
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Jena  

Allen's lengthy article serves as a postmortem -- or perhaps an autopsy -- for the Jena 6 case. The main defendant in the racially charged case, Mychal Bell, pleaded guilty to second-degree battery on December 3, ending a year of legal back-and-forth that put the town of Jena in the national spotlight. Allen examines the events and the manipulations of one man, Alan Bean, who made this case a cause celebre for civil rights activists by "creating a narrative" for the media that conformed to widely-held stereotypes of small Southern towns. That much of the media never bothered to read the evidence, or do basic legwork, is sadly apparent.
in The Weekly Standard by Charlotte Allen, 21 January 2008
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FNS: Rudy Giuliani

Once the front-runner on the Republican side of the presidential primaries, Rudy Giuliani is struggling to keep his name in the news. Wallace smartly uses the first half of this interview to question Giuliani about his strategy to skip campaigning in Iowa and New Hampshire. Giuliani risked having other candidates overtake him in momentum -- and, indeed, his visibility is down to near zero as the laurels go to his polar opposite, Mike Huckabee, and his closest rival for experience, John McCain. In the second half of the interview, Wallace asks Giuliani why should voters pick him over John McCain. The answer is, "executive experience."
in Fox News Sunday by Chris Wallace, 13 January 2008
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Cloudy Fortunes for Conservatism  

As a conservative pundit, Goldberg is very qualified to assess what is going on in the Republican presidential primaries. Here he makes some sense of the disconnect between the candidates on offer and the electorate's attitudes. There is a cognitive disconnect as self-described "conservatives" reject the core principle of smaller government, and the candidates who espouse that principle are floundering, while the populists are gaining steam. Goldberg sees the differences between Mike Huckabee and Fred Thompson as indicative of this shift, as the two native sons battle to find the philosophical pulse point of the conservative South.
in The Washington Post 'Outlook' by Jonah Goldberg, 13 January 2008
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Los Zafiros, Timeless in Cuba  

Ward reviews a new documentary about Los Zafiros, a Cuban doo-wop band that rose to prominence right after the Cuban Missile Crisis. They were wildly popular in Cuba, and experienced Beatles-like mania throughout the Communist Bloc. Most of the members have since passed away, but the documentary chronicles the reunion of emigre Miguel Cancio with the only other survivor, Manuel Galban, to great effect -- including a glimpse of the band's music.
in Fresh Air by Ed Ward, 11 January 2008
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I was very pleased to see this get coverage in the politics blog of the Washington Times:

More than 70 universities across the country will participate in “Islamo Fascism Awareness Day” teach-ins on April 19. Senator John Kyl and former Senator Rick Santorum have agreed to host showings at Arizona State and Georgetown. Former Cincinnati Reds pitcher and current radio talk show host Frank Pastore will host a showing at UCLA, and “Battlelines” talk show host Alan Nathan will do the same at George Washington U. Bay Area radio personality Melanie Morgan will host the showing at San Francisco State University, and Atlanta talk show host Martha Zoller will do the same at the Georgia Tech.

The event will consist of showings of “Obsession,” a documentary about the terrorist threat from Islamic militants. The film uses interviews with authorities on the Middle East, former jihadists, and experts on terrorism to take the viewer inside the worldview and plans for world domination of radical Islam. Following the film, there will be town hall-style dialogues about terrorism, the U.S. response in Iraq and elsewhere, and other issues. Some campuses will mark the event by other activities, including panel discussions by writers and thinkers on the terrorist threat.

Columbia University, Duke, Dartmouth, the University of Colorado, Georgia Tech, University of Texas, Notre Dame, Boston College, Ohio State, and the University of California at Davis are among the campuses that will participate in Islamo-Fascism Awareness Day on April 19.

Obsession was aired on Fox five times the weekend before the November elections, but I'm not sure anyone noticed.  I've only seen a 27 minute version, but it is excellent and chilling.  It should be required viewing in every grade of every high school in the country.

Anyway, I'll go to the UT  event.  They had a Palestinian Awareness Weekend a couple of weeks ago, complete with a performance of "I am Rachel Corrie," know here at Quid as "I am Pancake."  I had the flier here somewhere...workshops on how to get that bomb belt for your body type..."Kefiyehs: Political Statement as Indispensable Fashion Accessory"...."Just Blame the Jews: One Rule for Highly Successful Palestinians,"  and the list goes on.

From Lucianne.com (hat tip Ann):

Haditha: Is McGirk the New Mary Mapes?
June 9th, 2006

Evidence accumulates of a hoax in Haditha. The weblog /Sweetness &
Light/ has done an estimable service gathering together the articles
which cast substantial doubt on the charge of a massacre of civilians at
Haditha . Because the blog is too busy gathering and fisking the news, I
offered and the publisher accepted my offer to put what he has uncovered
in a narrative form.

Having done so, I can tell you that the story has a whiff of yet another
mediagenic scandal like the TANG memos or the Plame “outing.” While the
Marines quite correctly will not comment on the case pending the outcome
of their investigation, I am not bound by those rules, and I will sum up
the story for you.

(a) On November 20, 2005, Reuters reported that on the previous day an
IED killed a US Marine and 15 civilians in Haditha, a town known to be a
center of the insurgency, a town as hostile to our forces as the better
known Fallujah was. Reuters reported that “immediately after the blast,
gunmen opened fire on the convoy” and US and Iraqi forces returned fire,
killing 8 insurgents and wounding another in the fight. The paper
further reported that “A cameraman working for Reuters in Haditha says
bodies had been left lying in the street for hours after the attack.”
Reuters never named this cameraman but he was almost undoubtedly Ali
al-Mashhadani.

(b) Ali al-Mashhadani had been imprisoned for five months before his
report because of his ties to insurgents. He was subsequently placed
under another 12 days in detention for being a security threat.

(c) Tim McGirk of /Time/ wrote about the incident at Haditha for the
March 27 issue of the magazine. He unsuccessfully lobbied his editors to
use the term “massacre” in the story. McGirk seems hardly a neutral
reporter. He spent the first Thanksgiving after 9/11 in Afghanistan
dining with the Taliban and concluding
<http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:uRXcaBv4zQUJ:www.time.com/time/nation/printout/0,8816,185644,00.html+McGirk+Thanksgiving&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=1>
of this celebratory meal:

   Our missing colleagues finally arrive, and I leave thinking that
   maybe this evening wasn’t very different from the original
   Thanksgiving: people from two warring cultures sharing a meal
   together and realizing, briefly, that we’re not so different after all.

Right, Tim. We all want to enslave women, bend the world to Sharia law,
behead nonbelievers and otherwise carry on the honored traditions of the
Taliban.

A key source for McGirk’s report that US Marines in Haditha had
deliberately attacked civilians was Thaer al-Hadithi. whom McGirk
inexplicably described as “a budding journalism student”. He is a
middle-aged man, and was subsequently described by the AP as an “Iraqi
investigator.”

McGirk also failed to note that Hadithi is “a member and spokesman for
the Hammurabi.” The chairman of Hammurabi Organization and Hadithi’s
partner in publicizing the “massacre” is Abdul–Rahman al-Mashhadani. It
is unknown if he is related to Ali al-Mashhadani but their names suggest
a possible relationship, and it beggars belief that as /Sweetness&
Light/ notes,

   “Abdel Rahman al-Mashhadani just happened to be given a video by and
   unnamed local. And that he then turned it over to Ali al-Mashhadani
   who just happens to make videos for Reuters.”

Hadithi’s story is that was staying near to one of the two houses where
the massacre occurred and saw it with his own eyes. According to his
version of events he waited one day to videotape what had occurred,
though apparently nothing prevented his doing so from the very window he
“watched” it from as it took place. More troubling is why he waited
months to turn the tape over to anyone.

The actions of his partner al-Mashhadani are equally puzzling. On
December 15, 2005 Mashhadani was interviewed by the Institute for War
and Peace which described him as “an election monitor.” In that
interview he expressed great satisfaction with the election turnout
(which in fact was terribly low in Haditha). Why did he not mention to
this apparently sympathetic group one word about the supposed “atrocity”
which he claimed had occurred three months earlier?

Hammurabi apparently did share the video in March with the largely
Soros-funded Human Rights Watch which in turn provided it to /Time/.

(d) The videotape. On March 21, 2006 Reuters reported that Hadithi and
Mashhadani’s organization, the Hammurabi Organization, had provided the
organization was a copy of a videotape showing corpses lined up in the
Haditha morgue, claiming these were the bodies of civilians deliberately
killed by the Marines. Aside from the suspiciously-timed release of the
video and the fact that chairman al-Mashhadani had never mentioned the
incident or the tape in December when he was interviewed, the video
shows people removing bodies from a home, a report at odds with the
Reuters report the day after the incident which spoke of bodies lying in
the street.

(e) The witnesses to the “massacre”

   (1) The Doctor.

   In the March 27 report, McGirk quotes the local doctor:

       Dr. Wahid, director of the local hospital in Haditha, who asked
       that his family name be withheld because, he says, he fears
       reprisals by U.S. troops, says the Marines brought 24 bodies to
       his hospital around midnight on Nov. 19. Wahid says the Marines
       claimed the victims had been killed by shrapnel from the
       roadside bomb. “But it was obvious to us that there were no
       organs slashed by shrapnel,” Wahid says. “The bullet wounds were
       very apparent. Most of the victims were shot in the chest and
       the head–from close range.”

   Another report however, indicates
   <http://www.sweetness-light.com/archive/haditha-doctor-was-arrested-hates-us-too>
   the doctor bore considerable animus to the US troops.

   (2)The Iraqi eye-witnesses.

   In “Haditha: Reasonable Doubt,” Andrew Walden describes
   <http://www.hawaiireporter.com/> how a similar case against British
   soldiers fell apart , describing the Arabic “blood money” tradition
   which hardly is as exotic as it sounds. Ask the American Trial
   Lawyers Association.

   Reports of the eyewitnesses are conflicting and incredible.
   Al-Haditha was the source of a report by the AP on the death of a
   man whom the /Washington Post/ quoted 10 times as an eyewitness on
   May 27,six months after his reported death, and the young girl
   “survivor” has given between two and four utterly inconsistent
   versions
   <http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/06/haditha_lies_ex.html>
   of the events.

   (3) The American eye witnesses.

   There are two American witnesses who have spoken out. Despite the
   press spin, neither has a first hand account of the events.

   Lance Cpl. James Crossan is the source of some very selective quotes
   on the incident. He, however, was wounded in the IED explosion which
   killed the US Marine Martin Terrazas. He was evacuated from the
   scene and saw none of the after-action.

   And then there is Lance Cpl. Ryan Briones. He helped evacuate
   Crossnan and took bodies to the morgue. He was not an eyewitness. He
   claims he took pictures of the bodies at the morgue and has made
   various statements about what happened to the pictures and his
   camera. Aside from the fact that he is not an eyewitness, and his
   claims about his photographs seem unlikely, his story remained
   unuttered until he was arrested for stealing a truck, driving under
   the influence and crashing the stolen vehicle into a house. It was
   then for the first time that he claimed post traumatic distress and
   pointed to Haditha as the source of that stress. (His report of
   taking the bodies to the morgue, moreover, seems inconsistent with
   the first Reuters report that there were 15 bodies left lying in the
   street the day after the incident.)

The sum and substance of this thumbnail sketch on the Haditha claims is
that it follows so closely the template for the TANG and Plame stories.
Take a reporter with an anti-Administration agenda, an interested group
(think of the Mashhadanis as the VIPS in the Plame case or Burkett and
Lucy Ramirez in the TANG case) and a story too good to be checked and
circumstances where the people attacked are limited in what they can
quickly respond to and you get a story which smells to me like it will
soon be unraveled.

This time, I’m betting the consequences to the press which rushed to
judgment will be more disastrous than it was to Dan Rather. I surely
hope so.

Clarice Feldman is an attorney in Washington, DC and a frequent
contributor to Lucianne.com 

Tony Blankley has also written an excellent commentary about the media and Haditha.

 [...]But what further cuts is to listen to media people casually perpetrate libel against not just the still-presumed-innocent Marines but against our services more generally. To see the gleam in the eyes of reporters happily cackling on about "other possible incidents" -- about which they know not whether they even exist -- is to be filled with a fury that we have a system of journalism that permits people with such mentalities to poison the minds of the world with their malice.

 Of course if an American soldier, sailor, Marine or airman is found by a court martial made up of seasoned officers with a practical understanding of the exigencies of combat to have violated the standards of combat, he or she must face American military justice. But in time of war, there is no reason why military censorship should not be enforced to shroud the carrying out of justice from the eager eyes and ears of enemy propagandists -- domestic and foreign.

 Pending the implementation of such a policy, journalists should sharply limit their reporting to the bare established facts, preferably reported once on page A36. (You know, the way they report Democratic Party scandals.)

Okay, Martha is one persuasive woman.  So why didn't she get the confession?  Because the writers only gave her six minutes.

Aside:  I checked the timeline,  That's six minutes from the beginning of the "Oh  honey, I was a bit harsh when I called you a %&*$# traitor.  I really think that you are a great man and a stud" to "Here, let me zip you up."  According to my Guinness Book of World Records, that would mean that she is due for a mention just for the act of changing her clothes with such alacrity,even without the element of multitasking.  I'm sure there have probably been a few hundred thousand emails floating around that are alot like this one that I received from a friend: "I'm sure I would have used my prez-pass and held out for at least a couple of hours, even if Jack Bauer was knocking at the door and threatening to torture me.  But then that would have turned the show into 26 or 27."

You could almost hear Chloë whispering urgently in her ear, "Martha, you have thirty seconds!"  But do we blame  Martha? No, of course not.  We've only spent twenty-four hours with Charles and already have a book full of reasons we know he would be, uh, how to put this delicately...a disappointment in the boudoir.  Reason number one: worm tongue.  But I have to give it to the actor, Greg Itzin- that was a great tic.

"24" has  spawned a whole new orthopedic malady: "Jack Bauer elbow." 

Couples: Karen Hayes and Bill Buchanan; Martha and Aaron; Chloe and Spenser Wolff Edgar Lynn McGill the bank manager Morris...

We interrupt this blog for a message from our 16 year-old son:

THERE'S ONLY 10 MINUTES LEFT!! THE JERKS!! THE JERKS!!

Audrey and Miles; President Logan and  that male Rottweiler that's kenneled behind the stable and regularly taunted by a sadistic groundskeeper wearing a Richard Nixon mask.

It's been a fun season and you can see it all again in two hour installments on Fox, Fridays starting June 16. 

Immigration protests? Iran's got nukes? W impeached?  Shucks, that's nuthin',

It's National Poetry Month.

And It's April Fool's Day.

Coincidence? I think not. As a lover of poetry, I get a sinking feeling every year at this time.  After years of therapy, I realized that my anxiety was due to hearing bad poetry being badly read on All Things Considered during the month of April.  My symptoms of malaise become especially acute during those days that NPM coincides with the Spring Pledge Drive on the local PBS station.  There's just something particularly bad about hours and hours and hours of self-help seminars by the likes of Wayne Dyer and Andrew Weil, coupled with nostalgic reruns of Billy Don Moyers interviewing Joseph "Follow  Your F&$%*#$ Bliss" Campbell that seems to magnify the negative effects of the self-described poets reading their work in that stultifying death march cadence that makes John Kerry sound electrifying.  It's a combination that should be patented by the euthanasia crowd, like vodka and barbiturates.

Snap out of it!  We almost lost me there.  This will drive everyone but me and one other person crazy, but this post inaugurates the Official Quid Nimis Anti-Slam Poetry Month.   I expect all of you- yes, that means you- to contribute your favorite poem to this effort.  If you want to write one yourself, I may even publish  that.  If you suggest a particularly bad poem and label it as such, I will make a good faith effort to pitch it to the local NPR station and get it read on air, just to see if it's as easy to do as they make it seem.

For our debut, a selection from Q3, who expressed a longing for sour pickles and was given this instead.

Meditation on a Pickle Suite

       R.H.W. Dillard

Morning: the soft release
As you open a jar of pickles.
The sun through the window warm
And moving like light though brine.
The shadows of pickles swim the floor.
And in the tree, flowing down the chimney,
The songs of fresh birds clean as pickles.
Memories float though the day
Like pickles, perhaps sweet gherkins.
The past rises and falls
Like curious pickles in dark jars,
You hands sure as pickles,
Opening dreams like albums.
Pale Polish pickles.
Your eyes grow sharp as pickles,
Thoughts as green, as shining
As rows of pickles, damp and fresh,
Placed out in the afternoon sun.

OK, it's a long post. Just relax and go with it. At Quid, we get irritated and verbose so you don't have to.

Last Sunday (3/19) must have been "Marginalize Men Day" at the New York Times. Sort of the opposite of Father's Day. On the front page there was an article about men trying to claim the babies they fathered that are being put up for adoption by the women they screwed but couldn't or wouldn't marry. Then, on the inside, was an article about the growing trend among older single women to skip the whole mate-finding ordeal and go straight to motherhood by way of the sperm bank. That one was totally creepy: the central female subject carried a picture of the donor in her wallet, sent one to her dad ("This is your grandchild's father!") and, we are informed, he is an open donor, proven, meaning his sperm have already impregnated at least one woman and he is willing to meet any and all of the fruit of his loins after they turn eighteen.

[We pause here for normal people to do some deep breathing and try to cleanse their minds of the image of many young people at a "Who's Yer Daddy" family reunion twenty years hence. Clear your minds as well, of the idea of spending any time at all with a man who gets off (so to speak) on the idea of creating life, having this fact generally known to the children, but never, ever being a father to them.]

Worst by far was an article from the Style Desk (so fitting) under the Times category "Modern Love." I've read this column before, once, and realized that it was basically a forum for screwed up people to describe the ways they have messed up their lives and make it all OK by calling it modern and love. This installment featured an arresting graphic (forgive the play on words) of a heavily pregnant torso, in a jail, being wanded by a guard. That picture and the title, "I Need to Woman Up and Do this on My Own" were enough for me to start reading.

Right off the bat, the author, one asha bandele (no caps but the font the Times uses disguises this affectation) shows us that she has issues with time, and incidentally, men:

FIVE months after we were married, my husband, Rashid, and I had a honeymoon of sorts, a 44-hour jaunt in a trailer at the New York State prison where he lived. At 21 he had been convicted of a gang-related murder, which occurred three years before, and on this day he was in the 13th year of a 20-year sentence. We had met five years earlier, when I was 23, a college student teaching poetry to prisoners

Translation: She met Rashid when she was twenty-three. He was 29 (21+13-5). They married 5 years later, and honeymooned "honeymooned" five months after that for 44 hours. So she is about 28 and he is about 34 when they get married.

We need to get the timeline out of the way because she spends an inordinate amount of words injecting it into her essay, mostly unnecessarily, and in the most convoluted way possible.

...we married in the prison visiting room. Five months later we qualified for conjugal visits,...For five years this was our life, the life we chose.

They ended the marriage after five years or they chose another way of life. [Now would be a good time to start wondering who the "we" is: at least one of the parties in this arrangement doesn't have too many choices, but I suppose he did get married of his own free will.]

Three weeks later I found out I was pregnant.

Must be a record.

I had been married before and never conceived. I made love to my husband and didn't worry.

So she was married before, had unprotected sex then, too. but we won't find out if it was with someone in a lower risk category for HIV than a PRISONER.

A few years later I was on a book tour, celebrating what I felt was the beginning of my career, when Rashid and I were issued a date for a trailer...when my period was a couple of days overdue...When Rashid called, I told him directly: ''We're having a baby.''...And I was 32.

A few years is four and she's pregnant again at 32 and Rashid is in year 17 of a 20 year sentence.

My water broke a minute after midnight, and less than 11 hours later my daughter, Nisa, was in my arms. Seven hours later we were home, and I was eating pizza. Fifteen days after that I was placing Nisa's body in her father's arms for the first time.

Daughter born at 10:45 a.m. and we had pizza for dinner. Two weeks later we visited Dad.

And no, no, I couldn't hold my marriage together.

Seems from the narrative and the earlier reference that the baby was born but still a young infant when she divorced the Prisoner, who at this point has about 2 years to go on a 20-year sentence.

I'm not sure that the timeline is very very important but her way of dancing around the dates is so maddening that it's a distraction. Still, by the time I was done figuring out how old everyone was and what happened in what order, I was sorry not to have a distraction from the ridiculous truth of this woman's behavior, her utter self-involvement and her infinite capacity for self-justification. Just hitting the highlights

• Marry a prisoner.
• Have unprotected sex with said prisoner even though she absolutely doesn't want a baby because her life is unstable and she doesn't want to be a single mother. Incidentally, had unprotected sex with her previous husband, and presumably also the guys who raped her (plural: oh I forgot this timeline nugget:)

I began high school at 12, graduated at 15, and while I could put on heels and stumble behind the older girls, I couldn't negotiate the social settings -- bars and clubs -- where I found myself. On more than one occasion, what began for me as a fun night on the town ended as a date rape.

• Gets pregnant and kills baby and suffers terribly (we aren't told how the baby feels, but Rashid was very unhappy):

Though having the abortion was the right thing to do, I carried guilt about it for years... The weight of destroying something that was created from great love was nearly unbearable. There was no way I could ever do it again.

• Continues to have sex with a prisoner and uses not a condom, but spermicides- not your most reliable contraceptive and they don't prevent STD's. Not that you'd need to worry about that when you are in a monogamous, committed relationship with a PRISONER.
• Dumps prisoner as soon as she has her baby and her career was finally taking off, thanks to the apparently endless supply of custom for lurid, self-inflicted melodrama.
  

There's more, more, MORE! and all in really bad prose. Is it fair of me to pick on someone who has had such a hard life? Sure, she is a professional writer and that book signing? That was for her memoir, The Prisoner's Wife. So I consider it my duty to write scathingly about a mediocre writer who gets herself into bizarrely wretched situations, uses a helpless guy as fodder for her career (I'm thinking she thought the torture of the abortion would good copy, too.) I'll give you a few tidbits to make you grateful you didn't read the article;

"Our conversations -- unspeakably honest -- were for me life-saving."

Unspeakable conversations: see womb retention, below.

"I knew many women with incarcerated husbands did so [have babies], and while I didn't judge them, it wasn't for me."

and

"The rates of drug and alcohol abuse among young people, the violence that's glorified in pop culture, the girls who at 8 are having oral sex in school stairwells and the groundswell of so-called good girls out on the stroll terrified me. Not because I judged any of these kids..."

Still looking for the groundswell of good girls and this is a "no judgment zone."

"I began high school at 12, graduated at 15, and while I could put on heels and stumble behind the older girls, I couldn't negotiate the social settings -- bars and clubs -- where I found myself."

Note to self: stay away from bars. All kinds.

"Where could I go, where could I raise my child safely? I wanted to run, live off the grid, have my child, tell no one, keep her forever in my womb."

Neat trick.

''I can't play at house or marriage anymore'' is what I finally said. ''I love you. But I need to woman up and do this on my own.''

No, no: "I can't play at Big House or marriage anymore" So, she was playing. We knew that. "Woman up?" Really ghastly. This will probably make a William Safire column.

"Still, in that breakup I felt like I lost my husband, best friend, father and brother all at once. And I didn't just lose him -- I banished him. For that I may never be able to forgive myself. But I had to choose my child. Again."

Oh, I think she'll forgive herself. And does she come from a long line of detainees, or what?

Do I need to point out that ms. bandele is a published poet? This in part accounts for the nonsensical word pairings that pepper this essay. They sound good but give the whole essay an addled feel (groundswell of so-called good girls, indeed.) The other part that accounts for the nonsense is that she's a poseur who will wring every last drop of self-serving pathos out of destructive situations she created. And end up a featured guest on Oprah.

Well, the essay ends, on a happy note with the joyful toddler affirming life and its wonders. But one has to ask: wouldn't it have been easier to go to a sperm bank?

OK, I had never even heard of the movie Hustle and Flow until last week.  My guess is that it had even fewer paying customers than Brokeback Mountain (hard to imagine.)  So when I heard that "It's Hard to be a Pimp" won for best song, I was surprised.  That it was a song.

 And while we are on the subject of the heartache of Brokeback's losses, all of the clips I saw featured Heath Ledger wonderin' kinda out loud wut wuld happ'n if  everyone in tahn over yonder knew, yew know, how he wuz.  He could git kilt. 

Well, what a refreshing change of pace.  An inarticulate constipated sodomite.  Give that man a statuette and a red pocket scarf.