Author Richard Cahill's Website--Living By Our Motto:"There Are No Stupid Questions, Just Stupid People Asking Questions Everybody else already knows the answer to."

The following are the minutes of a special meeting among top Republican operatives concerned that the nominating process so far has not produced a candidate who could definitely beat Obama in November.

KINGMAKER: The results of our private interviews with the candidates are in, gentlemen, and they are not good.

CASHCOW: Amen to that, brother.

BAGMAN: I've been out of the loop on this. I know none of the candidates are perfect, but surely one must have produced positives.

KINGMAKER; (Wearily) You tell him, Cashcow.

CASHCOW: The best we've got is Romney. He hasn't made any major mistakes yet, but our private polls show that most Americans will not vote for a guy who's spent more money on his teeth than they have on their houses.

BAGMAN: I have to admit, I don't like the teeth myself, but we've got plenty of other candidates. I still think Bachmann can make it. We push her back in, turn on the money pipeline, maybe she has a strategic wardrobe malfunction…

KINGMAKER: (Sharply) Forget her, Bagman. We gave her the foreign policy test. The one we made up after Sarah Palin screwed up the ticket in '08. It's simple enough…

CASHCOW: Name ten foreign countries. That's all you have to do.

BAGMAN: (Disbelievingly) And she couldn't?

KINGMAKER: Used Canada twice and Nova Scotia once to make it to ten.

BAGMAN: People don't like voting for eggheads anyway. What about Perry?

CASHCOW: He did a little better. Mexico is a foreign country. New Mexico, however, is not. Still an F.

BAGMAN: We've still got grandfatherly old Newt.

KINGMAKER: Gingrich? The problem with him is voters apparently believe he's a new guy coincidentally named Newt Gingrich. Once they find out he's the same guy that shut down the government, bitched about his seat on Air Force and told his wife he wanted a divorce while she was being treated for cancer, his support vanishes.

BAGMAN: Then we've just got to grit our teeth and get behind Santorum. I don't see any other way out.

CASHCOW: Well, we need to find one. Santorum's on record as being in favor of banning abortion even in cases of rape and incest. A dramatic enough position, and when we pressed him about it in his interview, it turns out he's been misunderstanding the question all along. He's from western Pennsylvania, you know…

KINGMAKER: Known to Eastern Pennsylvanians as Pennsyl-tucky, or Baja West Virginia…

CASHCOW: And it turns out he's just in favor of rape and incest, period.

BAGMAN: Oh, my.

KINGMAKER: I tell you, gentleman, the situation is so desperate, last night I got down on my knees and prayed. Ordinarily, I know we leave praying to the voters, but I looked at our candidates and asked God for a miracle. Anything, although I was privately wishing for Him to raise Ronald Reagan or even Abraham Lincoln from the dead. And to my astonishment, the Lord answered.

BAGMAN: He's going to make Chris Christie run! We're saved!

KINGMAKER: Even better, although the name is similar.

CASHCOW: You mean? (awestruck) The Son?

KINGMAKER: Yes. He will return in glory to accept the Republican nomination.

BAGMAN: Wasn't that return originally scheduled for the Day of Judgment?

KINGMAKER: And the Republican nod for the Presidency isn't just as important? (looks coolly at Bagman) Fortunately, His Father is a better Republican than you, apparently. He's the one that did the arm-twisting on this.

CASHCOW: What about the legal issues? I don't mean to sound irreverent, but He's not a native-born American.

KINGMAKER: I think being carried down from Heaven by angels onto the stage in Tampa Bay at the height of the convention beats being born here all to hell anyway. And half the electorate believes Obama wasn't born here, either, so it's a wash. We can sweep every state except maybe Massachusetts, but we could even take that if Romney doesn't sulk and campaigns for Him there.

CASHCOW: (excitedly) My God, this solves all our problems! Global warming—we won't have to deny it anymore—it'll just be a part of His plan! Immigration! When Jesus tells those Mexicans they'd better head south, they'll genuflect all the way there! Terrorism! When it's Jesus versus jihad, I don't like jihad's chances. Not to mention the obvious--we'll lock up the Christian right forever and ever.

BAGMAN: (excitedly) Amen! All we have to do is figure out how to divvy up the Cabinet posts!

(While the operators are high-fiving, an AIDE comes in and whispers to Kingmaker)

KINGMAKER: (Slumping dejectedly) Never mind Him. Forget the whole thing. (Shakes his head wistfully) Back to the drawing board. He failed the background check.

CASHCOW: (Loudly) YOU RAN A BACKGROUND CHECK ON THE SON OF GOD?

KINGMAKER: Keep it down! Of course I did. It was routine. Glad I checked, though. (Leaning in. Sotto voce)  Did either of you guys know He was Jewish?

The man repeller herself

Leandra Medine, author of "The Man Repeller," a popular fashion blog described here, is also responsible for the term "birth control fashion," meaning fashion that is so outré it does not attract male attention but repels it. Leandra is pictured in the article wearing a few of her outfits.

I must confess I do not find her nearly as repellant as she imagines herself to be. True, the outfits are more cute than sexy, and more likely to be commented on favorably by a girl's GBF or BFF (Gay Best Friend or Best Friend Forever) rather than by a hetero male who leans amorously in her direction, but they're hardly the advance discouragers she imagines them to be. Sure, a halter top barely containing tanned, surgically augmented breasts would be more of a man-missile attractor (men are simple creatures, as most of you have discovered by now) but in the absence of a Victoria's Secret special or a Snap-On Tool calendar upon which to gaze, most of us would happily let our leering go Leandra's way.

On the other hand, due to women's relative sensitivity and intelligence undiluted by constant testosterone surges, birth control fashion for men is a piece of cake. If you guys want to be studiously ignored by the females of the world here are just a few of the myriad fashion mistakes you can make:

Wear a T-shirt from a strip joint or a legal brothel. This says to the girls "Hey, I'm immensely shallow, I believe in donating money to women who date men who are much wealthier or better-looking than me, or both, and if you do have sex with me, while we are entwined in love you won't be able to rid yourself of the creepy feeling that I'm fantasizing that I'm actually having sex with someone I saw on a stripper pole."

Wear hunting and fishing gear at all times.  One glance at you and women know that you will always want to bring home dead things for them to cut up. Dressing as if you are always going hunting or fishing means you will have ample time to sublimate your sex drive by crouching in freezing blinds or heaving over the side of small, rocking boats, because you will not be getting any sex.

Wear a Rick Santorum For President T-shirt. Girls know that nobody in public life this side of Tehran hates women more than Rick Santorum.

Wear everything a little bit too tight. Some of you guys do this instinctively, by fantasizing that your waist and shirt size have not changed since you were sixteen. Being only able to belt your pants right above your pubic bone or having your belly protrude into your shirt so that its fabric seems to stretch into an illustration of Einstein's space-time-gravity continuum in a high school science book is guaranteed to make women not want to look your way  

Facial hair. The ultimate Woman Repeller. Just stay away from the currently fashionable. Nowadays this means the moustache-goatee combination. The women of today think this is a fine look, even though I think it looks like a pubic patch for your mouth. Don't be discouraged. There are plenty of other facial hair looks that will let you have the solitary evenings you crave. Try the Kiss Preventer Mustache, for example. This is when you let the stache grow an half-inch or more past your lower lip. A fervent liplock is impossible with this facial fashion. Try it if you don't believe me. The North Sea Trawler Beard is another. Let the beard grow as if you have spent six months at sea, away from razor and scissors. A proper North Sea Trawler Beard should be capable of protecting the face from sprays of freezing brine, trapping the salty, sub-zero moisture in its outer layers. Of course, most of us don't fish the North Sea, so your beard will only trap bits of tortilla chips and cookie crumbs. Don't be discouraged; this is equally repulsive to our female fellow humans.

It's not a facial hair style, but worth mentioning here is the Bald Fringe Grown Long and Tied into A Disgusting, Spindly Little Ponytail. This repels men as well as women, so it's perfect if you're a bisexual who wants to be left alone.

The list goes on. A massive belly over a tiny Speedo, often favored by German tourists, dreadlocks long enough to conceal a kilo of weed, pretending ear hair doesn't exist—making any of these fashion decisions will insure that you spend far more time watching ESPN by your lonesome than the average Joe. Still, success at being a sexual hermit is never guaranteed. Somewhere out there, there may be a woman that wants you and will accept you in spite of all your efforts to discourage her. Popular genius Stephen Hawking just let it slip the other day that he regards the  female mind as the greatest mystery of the universe. I think Hawking was just yanking our chains, but if there's anything close to incomprehensible about women, it's the reason why they want us at all.

Some of you may have read this already, but here it is again, just to let you know that I was boldly talking Rick Santorum when nobody else was talking Santorum. 
The former senator from Pennsylvania, now running for President, says Senator McCain "doesn't know how effective"  enhanced interrogation techniques can be, even though McCain was a prisoner of war for five years and tortured on many occasions by his North Vietnamese captors.

An insider for the Santorum campaign brushed off criticism of Santorum's comments. "People question Rick Santorum's experience and political acumen. Remember, we're talking about a guy who served one full term in the Senate before booted out into the street by Pennsylvania voters. In the intervening six years, Rick has boosted his personal qualifications for higher office in a Herculean fashion."

Asked for an example, the Santorum spokesman replied. "As you know, Rick has always been pro-life, so he knows more about unwanted pregnancies than the women who don't want them. He's always been anti-evolution, so he knows more about science than scientists. He's always been anti-gay, so he knows more about the repulsive nature of homosexual acts than the homosexuals who perform them. It shouldn't surprise anyone that he knows more about torture than someone who's been tortured.

"Now that he's thinking about running for President, he's expanded the range of his knowledge even further. I can tell you confidentially that Donald Trump dropped out of the race because Rick showed him he knew more about being an orange-faced blowhard than Trump did."

When skepticism was expressed by this reporter his objections were brushed aside. "Frankly, the rest of the Republican field had better watch out for Santorum. He knows more about being an eerie loony from Texas than Ron Paul. He knows more about being a semi-literate housewife who's never read or written anything longer than a Twitter post in her entire life than Sarah Palin. He's an even bigger has-been than Newt Gingrich."

Asked if the American people didn't deserve a President with a more significant grasp of reality, the spokesman replied indignantly, 'I have no idea what you are talking about. When the sexual abuse scandal broke out in the Catholic Church, of which Rick is a proud member, Rick was the first one to point out that it was probably caused by increasing public toleration of homosexuality."

In other words, according to Santorum, if they hadn't watched Queer Eye, the offending priests would have kept their hands off the altar boys?

"Without a doubt."

A final question. Isn't it true that Santorum has no real hope of being nominated for President, and is hoping for the Vice-Presidency instead?

"The campaign steadfastly denies any interest in the Vice Presidency. However, Rick Santorum definitely knows more about being Vice President than Joe Biden."


here it is again, just to let you know that this bold political analyst was talking Santorum when everyone else was ignoring him:

I worked in and around the nightclub business for over twenty years, so going out on New Years Eve is unimportant to me. People who get stupid, blind, paralyzed drunk every day or at least every weekend certainly have issues, but at least they've learned to work around them. People who only get stupid, blind, paralyzed drunk once a year do so on New Year's Eve. They're not used to managing their erratic behavior. Those are people I wish to avoid.

So I selected a five-dollar movie from my Significant Other's cable movie menu and settled in for the evening, having no desire to be arrested for driving after four drinks or to be mangled by someone who's driving after twenty-seven. The movie was Bad Teacher, featuring Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake. It had nice pungent dialogue and Cameron wears a short skirt as well as anyone in the movie business. It reminded me of the similarly titled Bad Santa, another movie about a member of an occupation that is supposed to attract the morally upright (department store Santa, middle school teacher) who is an absolutely self-centered cheat and wastrel.

Fantasizing about cashing in on a Hollywood trend, I tried to imagine other careers where moral rectitude is demanded and a character with no morals whatsoever could attempt in a screenplay beginning with the word "Bad" to comic effect, but was frustrated that all my emerging seeds of genius (Bad Congressman, Bad Minister, Bad Archbishop of Boston) had already been played out in real life.

The only thing that bothered me about the movie was a tab in the corner of the screen that popped up when I paused it. "2001" the tab read. It didn't seem that I had failed to watch this movie for ten years. Of course, Cameron has been a movie star for some time, since "Something About Mary," which I know I'd seen more years ago than ten. Even Justin Timberlake has been a celebrity for years, long enough so that the teenage girls who used to throw underwear at him when he sang for 'N Sync are now raising teenage girls of their own, who are throwing their underwear at his successor in the field of teen heartthrobs who are named Justin, Justin Bieber.

It is one of the effects of aging, the study of which is eventually forced upon most of us, that the events of latter years seem to blend together while childhood events stand apart. The Vietnam War, the longest war in American history, was starting while I was still in kindergarten. Later, a friend in the lower grades had a copy of the "Ballad of the Green Berets" that I remember spending an afternoon listening to over and over with him, both dreaming of the day we would be old enough to fight in a war. After Johnson implied that he was not going to expand the war but did and Nixon promised to end the war but didn't, it turned out I was only a couple years short of being old enough to be drafted for that one.

The point is that war encompassed my whole childhood, passage through puberty and lasted until I was a legal adult. Like those years of my life, it seemed to last forever. On the other hand, the second longest war in American history, the current one in Afghanistan, has not seemed nearly so interminable, for various chronological, political and social reasons but also for me personally, since I was a middle-aged single father at its inception and will likely still be one for its scheduled end.

It seems like yesterday that Bill Clinton committed the impeachable offense of getting an oral sex act from Monica Lewinsky, although it was four Presidential elections and sixteen years ago. Google thinks it seems like yesterday, too; type in "monica" on the search bar and the first result that pops up is "monica lewinsky."  Remember how much fun that scandal was? That's why it seems recent. I'm sure remembering that act of oral intercourse isn't that much fun for Bill, which probably makes it seem a lot longer ago for him. Especially if he hasn't had one since.

Another delusion I suffer from is that my musical tastes are current, when I can probably identify maybe four major pop stars who achieved fame after 1989. Knowing the complete musical canon of Flock of Seagulls hits is no longer a requirement for being hip. In my sober moments, I realize that.

So it just seemed sad to me, that apparently I had ignored "Bad Teacher" for ten years. I didn't feel melancholy for myself, really, but for Cameron and Justin. What had become of them? Was the skin on Cameron's fabulous legs turning to shoe leather, as a result of her baking them in a tanning bed to satisfy the cosmetic demands of her career? Was Justin losing his hair?

Just then my Significant Other, who was ignoring the movie in favor of mastering a thick novel, walked into the room. I pointed out the tab on the screen and said "Did you realize this movie is already ten years old?"

"It is not," she said. "It was out last year. Must be a keystroke error."

I looked it up, and she was right. I was immensely relieved. Nothing like getting ten years of your life back for New Years Eve.