Sadly, No!

And that person is… Kerry L. Marsala. In this week’s column, Kerry has some very, very scary news to share with us, her loyal audience:

but all across this nation our public schools are reaping what we’ve so carelessly sown as parents.

Ladies and gentlemen: Kerry L. Marsala has children. (We believe their names are Pete M. and Ben Shapiro.)

There are sixth graders having sex before comprehension of consequences

If only those sixth graders could understand that every time they have sex a new right wing nut is born and spends an entire column complaining about other people getting some while they can’t, perhaps they’d think twice about what they’re doing.

and there are seventh grade students lying in hospital beds after a Wednesday morning “cat fight” at a local Jr. High School

Peterman: Well, I see what’s going on in here. I am smack dab in the middle of a good old fashioned cat fight.
Elaine: Mr. Peterman, this is not a cat fight. This is violent psychotic behavior directed at me all because are told her to swing her arms.
Peterman: Woof!
Elaine: Do you mean “reer?”
Peterman: Yes, that’s the one! Good day Elaine.

When did we as the responsible adults decide that we’d just give birth to this human being, dress it up, play with it when convenient, call it our son or daughter, and then just hand it over to the world to deal with when we didn’t want to deal anymore?

Uh, when we realized that we had married America’s Worst Mother?

Why when children misbehave do we automatically feel we must run to the doctor and demand a pill to control their behaviors? Are we raising a generation of children on “Mother’s little helpers?” We must be, because it would seem we don’t want to deal with behavioral problems at all. According to a recent study released by, CMDA News and Views on 8/19/04, ADHD is hard to diagnose, but once diagnosed can be treated. Many of our children may be suffering from bipolar disorder.

Even if our children are suffering from bipolar disorder however, we must not run to the doctor to get medication — because that kind of automatic (or dare we say obsessive compulsive) behavior is wrong. We just have to recognize that our children are suffering from a serious illness, and then try to cure it by putting hot sauce on their tongue when they misbehave. (After that we can start worrying about conservative pundits suffering from cognitive dissonance.)

Many of the cases of behavior problems can be contributed to substance abuse used by the mother when pregnant or by a chaotic living environment.

Just like very bad writing by Kerry can be contributed to her parents’ neglect of her as a child. Or something.

Our nation is looking at a growing problem of children who are at mental risk.

We’d go so far as to say that it’s not just the children who are at mental risk…

They’ll find ways to obtain love- pregnancy out of wedlock-several times over- abortions- moving from relationship to relationship- drugs, alcohol, psychiatrist couches, mental hospital ward[.]

Discuss.

Hi there, remember us? Sure, we left you all alone the last couple of days but that doesn’t mean we don’t care. Au contraire. Nor does it mean that Trying to Make Sense has succeeded in deleting not only our comments but our very existence as well.

We are, however, involved in a very secret operation that has forced us to relocate temporarily — so if Oskar told you that we’ve moved to Kaiserslautern for the next two months, we’re afraid he was telling the truth. It’s taking us a couple of days to settle in, but you have our personal guarantee that more nonsense will be posted in the very near future. Until that happens, just think of us as the poor man’s Dark Window.

Some random responses to comments left in the past few days:

Well, that is one torrid love affair that ended with a bang. Trying to Calculate Probabilities writes:

I can’t honestly believe that Seb has been reading my blog for an entire year, looking for things to nitpick. I get bored of his after five minutes. But you keep up the good fight, huh Seb? From now on, your comments are deleted here.

The post quoted here is rather long, so we’re happy to offer this shorter version:

I would rather be left to wallow in my statistical incompetence than have it pointed out to me by a heartless French Canadian bastard.

On an unrelated note, Shorter Michelle Malkin’s Remember 9/11: Stop sanitizing the killers:

We won’t be able to win the war on terror as long as the New York Times refuses to call Islam a cult.

You call someone bad names a few times, point out they can’t add or calculate probabilities, and what happens? If this comment posted by the management of Trying to Count is any indication, this:

Yeah, but that’s your bit, right? Running around the internet pointing out falsehoods and mistakes and fucktards? Why bother with me when there’s an enormous “sadly no” event going on in the world? Because it doesn’t support your worldview? Because you get bigger kicks out of pointing at the little guy? This is right up your alley, but you’ve said nothing. If you’re going to be a heartless bastard, then be one all the time. [Emphasis added]

Heartless bastard, moi? (Besides, we don’t run — we scurry.)

We meant to link to this earlier, but SullyWatch offers a sadly (?) all too plausible explanation for Sullivan’s linking to critiques of Michelle Malkin’s work.

SW also offers a good roundup of “the history of kerning” controversy:

This dispute over the authenticity of the memos is worth a paper by someone somewhere, as it?s an ideal (we think) example of an argument tailor-made for blogging. Thanks to Google, everyone can rather rapidly acquire some expertise on the history of typewriters and type and share it with the world to back up their opinions.

Nevertheless, we’re pretty sure that someone who is “twelve” isn’t considered to be a “teenager.” K-Lo writes:

MAYBE IT’S SOMETHING IN THE HOLLYWOOD WATER [KJL]
Actress Ellen Barkin would force her teen daughter to abort.

Meanwhile, in the article K-Lo links to:

“I am the mother of a 12 year old. If she was pregnant, I would take her kicking and screaming to have an abortion,” Barkin said at a press conference Tuesday to publicize her new movie.

In the film, Barkin, who starred in “The Big Easy” and won an Emmy in 1997 for her role in “Before Women Had Wings,” plays the mother of a teenager girl who is forced by her parents to have an abortion.

The heroine, 12 year-old Aviva, wants to be a mother. After a neighbor impregnates her, Aviva’s mother (Barkin) insists on the abortion.

Must be something in the National Review water cooler.

…why don’t you change the details, and pour some gasoline?

MedienKritik writes:

The article reports as a success of the “European-Iranian human rights dialog” that a 16-year-old girl will [Actually, she was hanged last month. –S,N!] not be stoned to death, but rather hanged.

Sullivan “summarizes” the post thusly:

A NINE-YEAR-OLD HANGED, NOT STONED: The fruits of German appeasement of Iran’s mullahs.

Andrew: do you ever fucking read what you link to?!? (While sticking the blame for the execution on Germany is just another in a long series of lows for Sullivan. As though, somehow, Iran’s mullahs would be dissuaded by Germany’s condemnation. Not that you would know about the execution from the US media, mind you, which has managed zero articles on the topic.)

(Sullivan’s post, arguably, is par for the course given that MedienKritik translates the German headline of the article as “A less cruel execution,” when the German text, Eine Hinrichtung, die weniger grausam sein soll, means “An execution that should be less cruel.” Added: A reader argues a more accurate translation would be: “An execution that’s supposed to be less cruel.”)

David “The Lion’s Share” Frum comments on the Kitty Kelley allegations:

According to her, the current President Bush snorted coke at Camp David during his father?s presidency. Now if somebody produced a claim that Bush experimented with cocaine in 1974 or 1975, before his 30th birthday and his marriage, before his break with alcohol and his religious conversion, I?d say that the charge was very unlikely, but maybe not absolutely impossible. But to say that he did it at Camp David between 1989 and 1993, when he was in his mid-40s, married, in the midst of his greatest business success, and on the verge of running for the governorship of Texas–a time when all his friends attest that he had quit drinking and was engaged in regular and intense Bible study–well that’s kind of nuts isn’t it?

Ignore, if you can, the casual ease with which Frum brushes off the possibility of a Bush “youthful indiscretion.” The guy “experimented” coke — who the fuck cares, he wasn’t even 30 yet! Is it called “experimenting” when a rich white guy does it, but “possession with intent to sale” when a poor black man does? (Don’t answer that!)

In any case — the point we meant to add was this: What is really nuts is suggesting that only single losers under 40 years of age with no job, no prospects and no money “experiment” with cocaine. Even people who believe in God do drugs — and if your defense of the charge is to pull up the deader than a dead horse Chewbacca Defense, you’ve effectively conceded the game. Just to drive the point home:

Lawrence Kudlow, the conservative Ivy-educated son of a rich New Jersey businessman, once served as chief economist for the Office of Management and Budget during the Reagan administration. Later, he earned $1 million a year at the investment house of Bear Stearns. He was also a cocaine addict who checked into the Hazelden clinic in 1995, after he blacked out and his third wife threatened to divorce him.

Added: James Wolcott adds his thoughts. (Thanks to retardo.)

The Washington Post reports:

In a version released Tuesday to reporters traveling with Cheney, however, the period at the end of “hit again” was removed and replaced with a comma, which linked his blunter statement to his standard stump language expressing concern that future attacks would be treated as “just criminal acts, and that we’re not really at war.”

Yesterday, the transcript on the White House Web site was altered to make Cheney’s remarks one sentence. Cheney’s White House spokesman, Kevin Kellems, issued a statement saying that the first official transcript “contained a typographical error” and was an “interim draft.” “These types of corrections are not uncommon in the transcription of verbal statements,” Kellems said. “The final transcript accurately reflects the statement as delivered, which is clear when watching video of the event.”

So you can see the new and improved transcript on the White House web site. Or you could see the non improved transcript on the official Bush/Cheney ’04 web site:

…very high. Yet we wouldn’t even think of leaving you without some kind of entertainment, which is why we’ve decided to offer two DaimlerChrysler TV commercials to keep you busy.