Holy crap, folks. I’ve heard a few people speak glowingly about Rachel Maddow, and since I’d already seen the House rerun (you know, the one where the patient has some really hard to diagnose disease and House figures it out and saves the patient at the very last minute?), I thought I’d watch. At fortysome minutes into the show, I told Diane I thought my head might explode and I needed to leave the room.

Have you ever known someone that isn’t comfortable unless they’re bitching about someone? Did she have a radio and tv show and a rainbow sticker on her pickup truck?*

To the point that I left the show, the entire thing (all of it) had been spent hammering the McCain side of the election with only insider nods of agreement with the Obama side. I stuck around past the halfway point to see if she’d turn her elephanthropy into donkey disdain. Nope. The two guests she had were from UC Berkeley and Mother Jones magazine.

From Rachel Maddow’s site:

“…loves arguing with conservatives…”

From the UC Berkeley website:

“We never met a communist we didn’t like.”**

From the About Us page @ Mother Jones:

“…a commitment to social justice…”

Who really wants social justice, anyway? Right. Nobody. And I’m sure nobody ever used the words “UC Berkeley” and “Communism” in the same sentence before I just did. Srsly though my point is there should be some sort of disclaimer on all political shows, declaring the political bent of the host(s) of the show. A station identification, if you will (an idea coined most recently by the Well Read Hostess, of whom I’m becoming more of a fan every day). But funner. Like a Perez Hilton scribbly over the head of whoever is speaking at the moment.

Like this:

Or this:

Because right now, the Not Really a News Show is waay more objective and even-handed than either of the hosts pictured here.

*Dude, that’s not me stereotyping. I can barely monotype. She totally drives a pickup truck So what - so do I. I’m also a lesbian. Sistahs unite!

**This may have been fabricated.

P.S. - Here’s one more from the MSNBC description of Maddow:

“…including lively debate with guests from all sides of the issues …”

Right. Kinda like when the waitress at the bar told Elwood Blues the kind of music they played there: “We got both kinds - Country AND Western.”

So there’s this guy running for this important government office. He talks a brilliant game of change.  But he has almost no experience. His running mate is the official Towboat of The Party Line. Very experienced, but the pants of change stopped fitting him years ago.

And there’s this other guy running against him. War hero. Will infuriate his own party if he thinks it’s the right decision. But he’s still pretty pissed about his POW days and can’t seem to leash that up. And he’s really old. And he just chose as (aesthetically) hot a woman as there is in politics today as his running mate. But she makes the first guy’s experience look like something you build a resumé around.

Decisions, decisions.

In an effort to hash things out for my own vote, I hope to dissect each candidate and their running mate.  If all goes well it should get pretty ugly around here.

It’s pronounced like a single word: Dickout. Do you have a male significant other who plays golf? Then someone in your inner circle likely knows what dickout is.

For those that don’t, here’s the specs: When guys get together to play a round of golf, at some point they may decide to play dickout, either for a single hole or for an entire round. Most often it’s a single hole.

The rules are simple: Dickout is only played on a par 4 or par 5 hole. Every man hits his drive from the usual tee box, but the man who had the shortest drive (which in a man’s world is directly proportional to that man’s manliness, or lack of manliness, in this case), must play the rest of the hole with his fly unzipped, penis dangling out.

It’s humiliation, plain and simple. Plain, simple and hilarious. Hilarious and childish. But hilarious. Did I mention that already? Through play of the remainder of the hole, one can often hear the sounds of words like “pussy” or “leave that thing at home - you aren’t using it here” wafting through the air.

To you ladies who feel the need to post publicly your husband’s flaws, for all to see and laugh at? It’s like dickout, humiliation and all. Clearly your man is the least manly of the bunch. Don’t feel bad; someone has to marry the pussy. I mean, why else would he let his spouse air every unflattering detail of his person or character to his prospective clients? His boss? His friends in the neighborhood? Because he’s the least manly, that’s why. Nothing he can do about it but sit there and take it.

So my congrats to you, blogging brides. You obviously had the bigger drive. Enjoy your husband’s humiliation.

Ok, I think I’m done now. Can’t wait to see what Google sends my way after this post.

First I have to thank the blogdom out there. Thank you, blogdom. If it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t be able to come up with half the material on this blog. I’m getting good about reading something that strikes a spark, I blog about it, then save it as a draft, and several weeks later post it after the burn and afterglow of the seminal post I read elsewhere has long since subsided. Makes it look like I thought of this all by myself. Intellectual integrity is not spelled with an ‘I’. At least around here it isn’t.

But this one can’t wait. There’s a smoldering poker cauterizing my ass and I need to extract it.

I have some hopes for this blog. I hope that some day far in the future this blog will serve as a way for me to remember the things that were going on with my kids and wife as we traveled along what has become the best adventure I’ve ever experienced. Like a photo album with bad grammar annotations.

I hope this blog will someday serve as a kind of road map for life for my kids. I haven’t blogged much about the lessons learned in business and in Corporate America, or my observations on life, but those days are coming. I think those posts will in all likelihood suck for someone coming here looking to be entertained, but whatever. I need to make this thing more about my kids than it has been so far.

I hope this blog will someday become popular. I’m certain I’ll never be the male version of Dooce, but maybe there’s an audience out there for my kind of shtick. And if it can earn some revenue from it’s popularity, even better. I mean, I don’t need to earn so much that I wipe my ass with twenties. Singles is fine.

But something this blog is not: It is not a place for me to air the differences I have with Diane. Frankly, I don’t understand the people that do. Maybe they’ve never spent any time in a corporate setting, having learned from the experience that comes from bad mouthing someone to others, only to end up having that person as their new boss. Or the person ends up having the ear of your current boss. Or maybe you have a project you need to drive through and the linchpin is this person you’ve been denigrating. If you’ve been in the white collar world, you know that there are grudges, and they can be held for years. In my previous career I held onto a few, and lived to totally fuck a couple people who needed a good fucking.

I love Diane. But equally important in our raising of these two awesome children we have is respect. I have a world of respect for Diane. She is the Yin to my Yang. The Ben to my Jerry. The Wonder Twin to my, uh, other Wonder Twin. I don’t mean to brag*, but we’re both brilllliant. But we’re brilliant in different ways. I have areas of expertise that surpass Diane’s, but she kicks my ass in other areas. I value her opinion in every topic, whether it be business or personal. And I trust her judgement. But the thing is, her judgement many times is different from mine. Does it mean she’s wrong? I’m wrong? To each of us, at the moment of impact, maybe. But we figure out a way to work it out. Sometimes it ain’t pretty, but we figure out a way.

I have way to much respect for her to ever consider insulting her on this blog, airing out what I would consider spousal or parental errors, so that I might feel better about myself. Like somehow a bunch of people I’ve never met, reading only my side of the story, can validate my feelings so that I can puff out my chest and march up to her and proclaim Her Wrongness, because 7 out of 10 commenters agreed with me.

That’s chicken shit. If you have an issue with your spouse, take it up with your spouse. Settle it with your spouse. At a minimum your spouse deserves that. If you can’t, then maybe there are some mutual respect issues you need to work out between you. But bitching about it on a public blog is not going to make it better.

For all of my ambivalence about Heather Armstrong’s blog, one thing I’ve never found on Dooce is textual acid spat at her husband. Hurled keys and milk cartons, maybe. But never “look how stupid my husband is.”

So to recap: If you regularly air out your spousal complaints for validation among a biased jury, or maybe just for the entertainment of a few blog readers, you are not a blogging hero.  You are Chicken. Shit.

Have a nice day.

*Lie

What would you define as a tolerant person? Someone who doesn’t give the nervous/evil eye to a man with an olive complexion and a turban when he boards your plane? Someone who has a friend or two that are gay? Those seem like the easy ones, right? Tell a gay dude he has a nice ass and you’re probably considered open-minded.

Conversely, if there’s a guy whose cheeks clench in the presence of a gay man, as if some kind of gay rays might penetrate his sphincter and begin the DNA conversion process, he probably isn’t on Santa’s tolerant list (or confident in his manliness, for that matter). Give a Robert De Niro (Meet the Parents) I’m watching you hand motion to a guy who looks like his name might include an Ahmed, and maybe the guy hasn’t jumped into the big melting pot just yet.

But what about the Religious Right? Do you know someone that embraces atheists like wise men but scoffs at someone with an ardent belief in their God? Has cute little nicknames for them like “fundy?”

So you know where I am with all this, I flip-flop between being a Christmas and Easter Catholic and being a Christmas, Easter and a Few Extra Sundays Catholic. I never quote chapters or verses. I’m not sure I know any Chapters or Verses. I tried to read the Bible once and fell asleep trying to get through Genesis. He begat him and he lived for 900 years, then he begat this one and he lived for 700 years…zzzzzzzzzzzz……

But doesn’t it seem the tiniest bit hypocritical for a person to claim to be tolerant when really they only tolerate people with beliefs similar to theirs? One of the definitions Google finds when executing the define: tolerant command is this:

showing respect for the rights or opinions or practices of others

I have to wonder if lately some have been confusing that with

showing respect for the rights or opinions or practices of others to the extent that it’s stylish to do so

And hey, I’m no angel. I’m not sure I could call myself tolerant. Sure, if a prospective client couple is man and man, I may point my ass to them when taking measurements of their place, just to try to sweeten the deal (cue Ferris Bueller’s Oh, Yeah) , but I’m not sure that in all cases with all people I could be considered tolerant. It’s just that I’ve been seeing other people out there raise a shiny flagpole bearing a bright, billowing flag of inclusion, but the bottom appears to be planted into the chests of some unpopular groups of people.

Ok, rant over. Had to get that off my chest.