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The 900 Foot Jesus

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. Well, we’re getting some much needed rain today. Thank you Baby Jesus. Sometimes when I get all touchy-feely during rainstorms I recall the words to the song “Raindrops” by Dee Clark. After my emotional outburst from last night I guess I’m feeling a little tender, and the song won’t leave my head.

Speaking of feeling a little tender, Mulva reports that the Right Reverend Dale E. Bread has not deemed himself to be fit to be the star attraction at The Full Gospel Original Church of God, yet. A traveling minister, Reverend Evan Elpus, was brought in to handle the altar call and the main feature. Mulva says everyone misses Old Ben, who has not been seen since the incident. It seems that folks don’t seem to appreciate a group of copperheads and water moccasins like they do an eight foot timber rattler. I suggested bringing in a Coral snake to add a little color, but Mulva declined to pass on my suggestion. I guess the congregation is going to have a “wait and see attitude” with regard to the Reverend Bread. Since I’m expressing emotions today with songs, I’ll throw out “Once Bitten Twice Shy”, by Great White. I don’t know that the Reverend Bread listens to 80’s “hair bands”, but he might see the humor. Maybe not.

All of this talk about preachers puts me in mind of one of the most successful pastors of all time, Oral Roberts. Speaking of waxing eloquently, Oral lived up to his name. He could spin a tale with the best of them. He’d have you “walking down the garden path”, as they say in the sales biz, and be so convinced everything was true you’d be picking daisies along the way. As you remember, my Daddy, Bocephus Lite, was one of the great salesmen of all time. Daddy paid particular attention to preachers, particularly televangelists, and would hoot out loud when one of them would spin a particularly convincing yarn.

Daddy use to call preachers “air salesman”. He’d say, “look at what they’re selling, is there a product you get to take home with you”?, “Is there even a piece of paper that signifies you own something like land or stocks”? “No, there’s nothing!”, “For ten percent of your life’s earnings you’re given a promise that when you die you’ll be given a place in this magical land that no one has ever seen!” He’d finish up with, “Now that’s salesmanship I tell you!” After I got older I’d finish up Daddy’s rant for him with, “And no one’s ever come back and asked for a refund!” For which I’d get an “attaboy” and we’d enjoy a moment for a little while.

How this relates to Oral Roberts is this; one Sunday morning when my days and night’s were confused I was watching Oral on the TV when out of the blue he started going on about a 900 foot Jesus he’d seen while driving around Tulsa, Oklahoma. Now, Oral related that Jesus was at least 900 feet tall because he was taller than some other local landmark that Oral named that I can’t remember. It seems that the Lord can not be intimidated by any man made structure and so he appeared to Oral as something larger. Well, my mind is racing and I start yelling for everyone to wake up and gather round ’cause old Oral has finally gone off his nut and is coming unglued on national TV. Oral continued with his dissertation and relates that Jesus spoke to Oral through his car radio, and I go, “good catch”. I was already thinking that a 900 foot Jesus would belt out a pretty loud tune if asked to sing, so any message He uttered would not be a secret. Oral covered his bases and went on to relate that Jesus told him to build a gigantic, humongous, super-sized medical center there in Tulsa and that the Doctors would all have to believe in faith based healing.

Well, Oral needed big bucks for this endeavor and the faithful ponied up with a boatload of money. At a later date Oral told the faithful that God had given him an ultimatum, that if Oral couldn’t come up with the big bucks by the end of the year then Oral would be “called home”. The faithful dug deep and came up with 9 million reasons to keep Oral on this mortal coil. Not long after that the “City of Faith” closed its doors. Something about doctors and the AMA not wanting to give all of the credit for a successful operation to the Lord. Go figure.

After assorted lawsuits for misappropriation of funds, Oral’s income declined from an estimated high of $88 million in 1980 to $55 million in 1986. Not bad for an “air salesman”.

As we conclude this Sunday’s service please remember to take your coats and umbrellas from the vestry as you leave. And please remember, take only your coats and umbrellas.

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Solitary Man

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. As the clock strikes midnight, it is exactly one week until my beloved Bulldogs take the field against the infidels of the University of Louisiana at Monroe. I bear those boys no ill will, just a sound thumping, somewhere in the neighborhood of 51-0. Anything less will prove to be a disappointment. 

Speaking of disappointment, Mulva and I had date night last night, and before you yahoos start jesting about what the disappointment was, let me clarify. Friday night is traditionally spent watching our local high school team, the Nunsuch Cooters play against other 1A competition. Some times our boys will venture over into Tennessee or the Carolinas to find competition worthy of our level of play. We may be small, and we may be few, but like our namesake, when we catch a-hold of you we don’t let go. At least until it thunders as the legend goes. So, when someone calls you an old Coot, wear the label with pride.

Since the terms of my parole don’t allow me to travel to the games, Mulva got a video for us to watch on the big screen in the rec room as our “date night”. We had to wait until the 11PM closing of the rec room before we could have the place to ourselves. Mulva had popcorn and sodas and it was pretty close to a Cineplex experience. She’d even picked up my favorite Milk Duds from the Walmart. My spirits had just about returned to neutral from the low of missing the Cooters play, and then the movie started.

The Solitary Man, starring Michael Douglas, and a host of other folks you’d recognize. Now I can take or leave Michael Douglas, I guess he’s a good actor and all, but it’s not like I’m sitting on pins and needles waiting for his next flick to come out. Not like Arnold. Anyhow, turns out Mr. Douglas is playing a character that is a royal, revolving screw-up. When I say “revolving screw-up”, I mean any which way you turn him, this guy is screwed up. About the time it dawns on me that Mulva may have conspired the movie as a setup, and all of the nice things she has done in setting up our “date night” have been a ploy to get me to see a fellow that had everything and let it slip through his fingers, Johnny Cash comes on singing a Neil Diamond song. The all too familiar feeling of the heat rising in my face and ears dissipated. Take a listen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLhoyEhfNYE

Well, my heart just broke. I cried like a baby and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I don’t know that I’ve ever cried that long or hard before. It seems like it lasted forever, but I can see by the Dr. Pepper clock it didn’t. I know that when some people give their soul to Jesus that the emotion in the release of turning over their life to a higher power causes them to cry sometimes. Based on the events of the evening, I guess I just gave my soul over to Johnny Cash. I’m comfortable with that.

Oh, by the way, Neil Diamond and others, don’t ever attempt to sing that song again, it’s been sung.

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Remembering Katrina

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. The weather is actin’ like it can’t decide whether to fry us where we stand, or drench us with a monsoon. Checking the weather radar reveals the remnants of a hurricane named Danny about to strike Florida and yet another one name Erika kickin’ up a fit along the same path. Maybe we’ll get some rain from all of the activity, certainly hope so.

Talking about hurricanes always reminds me of Katrina, and it turns out this is the tenth anniversary of Katrina making landfall in New Orleans, La. Now in case you didn’t have people there, or business interests there, you might not have followed the Katrina tragedy as closely as I did. I had both. My cousin Sissie and her family lived across the lake in Mandeville. Sissie and her family were always kind enough to put me up when my travels carried me to the New Orleans area.

My business interests in the great state of Louisiana were kind of a funny story. Daddy died in 2001 and at the time of his death he had a vending business that serviced the machines in men’s rooms all over the South. You know the ones I’m talking about, the ones that sell combs, salves, creams and well uh, protection. As we’ve all seen from movies about the Mob, protection is a big business and Daddy had scored his share of the protection game from some poor fool that didn’t know when to hold ’em and when to fold ’em. Anyway, Daddy’s gone and the fellow that serviced the machines for Daddy just didn’t look like he could be trusted. He was a cock-eyed fellow named Will B. Cheatum. While I didn’t have any proof yet that he was cheating Daddy, the fact that when you tried to talk to him you couldn’t look him directly in the eyes was proof enough for me. After securing all of the locations from Will, we parted company and I started traveling all over the South. Turns out, “protection” is good business. It was particularly good in Louisiana where the population was overwhelming Catholic. Like Daddy used to say, “faith goes out the window when lust comes in the door”, and the good folks of Louisiana provided the Lites with a good steady income.

In my travels to Louisiana I was accustomed to seeing shop owners drag out their plywood and board up their window fronts to protect against the upcoming storms during hurricane season. I knew the rumors about what disaster would befall the city of New Orleans if a hurricane ever hit “just right”. Ten years ago today, one of the largest, strongest hurricanes ever recorded hit New Orleans “just right”, and the people of New Orleans were not prepared. It is easy for any Monday morning quarterback to point out the mistakes of others. We can all acknowledge that many folks didn’t heed the warnings as they should have. Speaking for myself, Old Bud beat a path for the Georgia hills that Bandit and Cledus would have been proud of. I watched America’s greatest tragedy from the comfort of my armchair.

I do not use the phrase America’s greatest tragedy, lightly. In my lifetime we have screwed some things up royally, with thousands and thousands of dead, but the dark in my heart lets me rationalize that the destruction of others was not as bad as the destruction of our own. The people of the Gulf suffered the worst natural disaster we’ve known and Washington couldn’t decide whether to wind their butts or scratch their watch. Apparently the decision was finally made, and the phrase “screw ’em they don’t vote for us anyway” was attributed to Dick Cheney. The people of New Orleans were in a hell without fire, chest deep water was the constant reminder of their misery. There were no city services and even the police turned into a rogue band of wolves. People with no refuge waited on roofs or wherever they could to stay dry; waiting for their government, their tax dollars, to help them in their hour of need. Thousands of people were jammed into the Super Bowl, which was supposed to be an evacuation site. Imagine being in Hell, in the dark, with thousands of strangers, and all of the toilets backed up. President Bush’s momma thought they had it pretty good, she is quoted as saying, “And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”

We have tried to disrupt local cultures all over the world to change the demographics to favor “American Interests”. Viet Nam, Iraq, throw a dart at Central and South America, are a few examples of the indigenous people who have received “special attention” by our government in order to change their hearts and minds. Doing nothing for the people of New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina has had a longer lasting result with much greater effectiveness.

Until we meet again New Orleans, Laissez les bons temps rouler!

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11 Alive – Not So Much

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. As has been reported, I watch a lot of TV, a lot of TV. Up here in the hills a lot of our favorite choices are determined by how strong the signal is. The conversion to a digital signal a few years back kind of caught me unawares, but like a resilient bacteria, I have adapted.

After not being able to watch my 21 inch RCA over in Number Two for about a week, I broke down and got an HD antenna and converter box. It was an easy choice, the two together cost less than a month of cable. If need be, I can always go over to the rec room to watch ball games on the big screen. I just use regular TV to get the local news and network shows. A good news show is real important to me.

Over the years the NBC news has been our favorite, going back to Grandpa Lite and his obsession with The Huntley-Brinkley Report. Grandpa Lite use to delight in imitating both reporters, passing the story off to himself. Our NBC affiliate is out of Atlanta, channel 11, or 11 Alive as they like to bill themselves. I’ve stuck with them through the transition of one of my favorite ever anchors, Brian Williams, to Lester Holt, who in my humble opinion is adequate. I know there’s real smart people out there who study demographics and know exactly how many people watch 11 Alive to lead in to the NBC Nightly News just because we’re too lazy to get up and turn the channel. I’m one of them, but I’m about to change.

To me the worst thing that can happen with a news agency is to begin thinking they’re more important than what they’re reporting on. 11 Alive commits this travesty every night. First off the show is segmented into 5 minutes of weather, 5 minutes of news, 10 minutes of weather, 5 minutes of sports and 5 minutes of soapbox. Now the first 5 minutes of weather are the least odious portion of the show, followed by the sports section which is too short in my opinion. The news section is generally local fluff, local shooting, and any possible connection to Georgia in the national news. For a news agency whose byline is “holding the powerful accountable”, they do precious little of it. I reckon there’s not any graft or corruption in Georgia, at least not that 11 Alive can see.

Next we move to the most odious portion, the 2nd coming of the weather. Let’s start with assigning each day a rating, which they call the “Wizometer”.  Honestly, the whizz o meter; are you rating the day or measuring my bladder output? The Wizometer sports a rating that suspiciously tops out at 11, like Spinal Tap’s amplifiers. It’s a cute idea, I’ll even overlook the vague Spinal Tap similarity, where I draw the line is whatever fuzzy math is being used to assign the day’s value. If clear skies and 72 degrees are an 11, which I will agree with, how does 87 degrees become a 10? Conversely, would 15 degrees off of optimum make 55 degrees a 10 as well? Not just no, but heck no. A cloudless 90 degree day looks like a 10 when you’re sitting at your desk in the air conditioned office looking out the window. Go out and walk in it and see how close to perfect it is.

Let’s talk storm coverage. Someone got a new toy that tells the weather caster how many lightning strikes are in a storm. They will drone on and on about the lightning strikes while barely mentioning if I’m going to get 3 inches of rain or a 1/3 an inch. Christ on a cracker, there’s a reason that “struck by lightning” is a phrase used to describe a very rare occurrence. Spend ten minutes telling me if I’m going to get flooded out, not struck by lightning.

Hot on the tail of the perfect day analysis, comes the self proclaimed “most accurate forecasts”.  The same fuzzy mathematicians that brought us the “11” day, have come up with a statistical analysis with an over under that allows for near perfect predictions. Weather forecaster says tomorrow will be 90 degrees, add in the over under of 4 degrees and a 94 degree day becomes an accurate forecast. Coming up with crap like this so you can pat yourself on the back undercuts all of your credibility.

Five minutes of sports is not enough and unlike the real news, you can’t count on the network to fill in the gap and cover your inadequacy. Not all of us get ESPN, so let’s expand sports to cover the 2nd coming of the weather. If I start suffering from weather information withdrawal, I’ll look out the window.

Finally, we come to the “Final Word”, oh my God, if it just were. In this last segment before the hand off to the network, the anchor takes some news item and personalizes and moralizes the story. Most recently it was the shooting of the two TV anchors, which the anchor personalized ad infinitum. I guess the anchor just figured out we’re all sitting ducks waiting for the next nut to take target practice. As the husband of a woman who now goes to the Cineplex and first checks the location of the exits and fire alarms before sitting down, I’d like to tell the anchor, “I’m glad you finally got the news”.

Channel 11 clean up your act or I’m gone, and that’s my Final Word.

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The Attack On The 14th

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. I find as I get older that it is easier to compromise some of my lofty ideas and just take the easy way out. I’m talking about Kudzu, and I’m talking about Roundup. Time was I wouldn’t use Roundup, partly  because I want to think of myself as an environmentalist, and partly because of Agent Orange. My attitude has always been “screw Monsanto and the horse they rode in on”. The older I get the easier it is to let my standards slip. It’s hard to cry ’nuff to a plant.

Some folks who claim they believe in Democracy and our American way of life, folks who are willing to spend our treasure and our youth to push our system on the other peoples of the world, are now attacking one of the cornerstones of our Democracy, the 14th amendment.

For those of you unfamiliar, here is an excerpt:
Section. 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Now, the timing of the 14th goes back to post Civil War when the “back to Africa” crowd wanted to deny all rights to the recently freed slaves. To protect the blacks, and each succeeding generation, the 14th was adopted to determine that any baby born on U.S. soil was a U.S. citizen, and therefore entitled to all of the rights and privileges of a citizen. It didn’t matter where your parents came from, or how your parents got here, if you were born on American soil, you are an American citizen. To double down on the concept, the amendment prohibited any state from making specific laws that would inhibit the enforcement of a citizen’s rights. This is the oft referred to “equal protection under the law” that comes in to play when a group/class of people have the expectation that an act permitted in one state should be allowed in another. Think voting.

Now we find a group of candidates that want to repeal the 14th amendment to improve the survivability of the Republican party, and to grease the wheels on the “back to Mexico” bus. If the “back to Mexico” crowd can deny the Hispanic children their birthright of American citizenship they can avoid one of the legal hurdles in rounding everyone up and sending them back over the Rio Grande. If this proposal succeeds, all of those naturalized Hispanics of voting age will have lost their right to make a difference in our leaders, their voice in our democracy. And the irony, the proposed changes to the 14th comes from those candidates that would have us all die in church at the hands of a madman rather than arrange one comma in the 2nd amendment. I hate a hypocrite worse than anything.

It’s hard to see how this plays out in this election. One would assume that the current citizens by birthright would be grandfathered in to whatever these new “champions of democracy” are going to propose. It’s also likely that any “right leaning” Hispanics might be encouraged to vote for the Democrats out of fear for having some other indignity imposed on them in the future. If the “back to Mexico” bus leaves on time, then the “red states” with high Hispanic populations will go from purple back to solid red. It probably doesn’t stop the inevitable, just delays it for another election cycle or two. I guess that would give The Donald time to declare martial law and require all of us to have our immigration genealogy verified. A new industry, Citizen Validation, is born, and a dying industry, bus travel, has a boon. Who says the Republicans don’t create jobs?

Well, Dr.Pepper says it’s good at 10, 2, and 4, and since it’s nearly 2 A.M. I believe I’ll end this and go have one.

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Don’t Mess With A Classic

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. Now that the heat has broke a little bit, I’ve been back outside trying to keep the Kudzu cut back. I figure I can save a little money doing the yard work as far as my anklet will let me wander. The money that I don’t pay that “Landscape Specialist” is money in my pocket. I’m too durn poor to have a “specialist”.

While wrestling with the Kudzu, a Japanese import that is now synonymous with the South, I got to thinking about other things that are emblematic of the Southern way of life. Sweet tea that’s got so much sugar in it that the cavities in your teeth scream, “stop, no more, we can’t take it anymore”, would be the number one item on my list. Fried everything is next.

I swear I nearly swallowed my tongue when we went to a BBQ joint one time and they were serving fried dill pickles. Now honestly, I always thought they were supposed to give you dill pickles as part of your order. This enterprising bunch thought, “why don’t we batter ’em and fry ’em and we can charge $4.00 a pickle instead of just giving them away?” The pickles were right good, and they were selling a bunch of them, which proves the old Southern adage, everything is better battered and fried. There can be no better proof of the adage than okra. I can eat buckets of fried okra, and I can barely look at it stewed. Same thing squash. As a person whose personal BMI is slightly north of Hank Aaron’s lifetime batting average, I have been made aware that dietary choices play a factor. Fried should be at the bottom of my list of choices, but fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and cat’s head biscuits would be my choice for my last meal. 

My personal tastes were the springboard for a very successful business, Kentucky Fried Chicken, or KFC as they prefer to be known today. To date I’ve received no royalties for developing the perfect menu, and I guess the folks at Pepsico think their chicken recipe means more than the items. The KFC folks are so secure in their knowledge of what the public wants that they’ve decided that they can just mix the meal up into one bowl and save on packaging the items individually. As unappetizing as that sounds to a person that loves the product, imagine how that plays with people who don’t like their food touching each other on the plate. There is no amount of explaining to these plate purists that the foods are all going to be touching each other soon. They know, they don’t care, right now, “get my cole slaw away from my mashed potatoes!”

As ill-conceived as the “bowl’ is, KFC has really topped themselves in trying to impersonate the Colonel. Colonel Harland Sanders is as much of an American icon as Coca Cola. Trying to parade someone out as creepy as Darrell Hammond is in the commercial below is as nauseating as the product he’s pushing, the bowl. Take a minute, play the commercial and see if you don’t agree, I’ll wait.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXB2MDaA0A4

 Makes you want to call your family inside doesn’t it? I know sometimes artists are given room to add their own interpretation to a role, but, please!!!!! I’m an old man, and this scares me, what does this commercial do to KFC’s target demographic?

In summation to all of you ad execs out there, sometimes all you have to do with a product is not screw it up. No “new coke”, no diet candies name Ayds, and definitely no creepy Colonel Sanders.

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Profiles in Courage

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. I am happy to report that it is Zombie season again, even if it’s taking place on the left coast with a group that looks as clueless about survival as a kitten. I’m guessing some of them are going to learn how to survive. It’s very clear that the disaffected teenagers of the mixed family are going to learn newfound respect for their parent’s new choice of mates. One of the writers must have an issue at home.

Well, I’m going around my knee to get to my elbow to discuss an act of true courage that happened this weekend in France. Before you of the “greatest generation” cry “balderdash” on me for suggesting courageous acts in France, let me preface my remarks with the fact that the acts of courage were predominately American in nature. Before I spend my day dodging Freedom Fries, let me explain the events and how they stand out as true profiles in courage. 

Three young Americans were traveling on a train from Amsterdam to Paris when they were confronted with every tourist’s worst nightmare, a nut with a gun. Now in truth, that nightmare plays out for me in a variety of settings around here since the open carry law was passed in Georgia, but we’ll discuss that another time. These young men were confronted with a life or death situation in the confined space of a train while speeding through the country side. I imagine they were just chilling, having a beverage, checking their email when all hell broke loose. As sketchy as the details are now, a French national saw the nut emerge from the toilet heavily armed and confronted the nut. Shots were fired, and the Frenchman was severely injured by a box cutter while trying to corral the nut. The Frenchman was left bleeding from a neck wound while the nut moved on. The nut moved into the next car where he walked by a British national who sprang into action after the Americans sitting in the last row of the car charged the nut and took him down. The lead American, Spencer Stone, was cut several times by the nut, almost severing his thumb in the ensuing struggle. The other two Americans, Chris Norman and Anthony Sandler struggled to get the weapons secure and then to hogtie the nut. The perpetrator had an AK47, a 9mm pistol and the box cutter. It is reported that the nut had many rounds of ammunition. We can surmise that the nut was intending to inflict severe damage in a confined space where the victims had no opportunity to escape. The nut’s lawyer has already stated that it was not an act of terrorism but a simple train robbery. We’ll see how that plays out in court.

There is a special heroism, a level of courage, that is involved in being able to sacrifice yourself in the hope that your efforts will save others. Obviously, not everyone is born with it. The fact that these three Americans sprang into action from the opposite end of a train car almost ensured that one or all would be cut down before reaching the nut. Details are unclear as to why the nut didn’t fire directly into their charge, but as far as the Americans knew, they were going into a hail of bullets. A jammed weapon, or a brain misfire by the nut, does not diminish the self sacrifice displayed by the three Americans and the Frenchman. I will leave out the Briton at this time except to say that he was there at the press conference to claim a lion’s share of the attention for his role in helping to secure an already beaten opponent. I expect the “greatest generation” readers may be nodding in acknowledgment right now.

I will finish my gush of emotion by saying that there are stories of bravery out there every day, all over the world. I wish the media would cover these acts of courage and spend more time talking about these heroes instead of subjecting us to the Kardashians. Oh well.

To the heroes of this story and their parents let me shout out a heartfelt Ooh Rah! and God’s speed.

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Dugarring III

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. I’m happy to report that the Right Reverend Dale E. Bread was back in the pulpit yesterday of The Full Gospel Original Church of God. His duties were limited, I am told, and a traveling preacher was brought in to handle the entertainment portion of the show.

While talking with Mulva about the nature of sin and in particular this, “week in perversity”, she brought up an interesting point. What if I’ve let my misogynistic views falsely accuse Jim Bob of being the one who didn’t know when to call ’nuff? The Duggars relate their “meet cute” story as Jim Bob and a friend met Michelle on an outreach mission to her house. The story is that Michelle was known to have “wandered from the path” and Jim Bob and friend were sent to proselytize for their church. Now, I bet every male reader out there has at some time gone on a mission with a friend to a girl’s house that was rumored to have wandered from the path. Fortunately for the world food supplies, not all of those missions resulted in nineteen mouths to feed. In the interest of fair play, and keeping family peace, I’m willing to say that Michelle might be the “horn dog” of the relationship, but my money is still on Jim Bob.

What we do know about Michelle is that there was no way that the children were getting anywhere near the amount of motherly attention they required or deserved. As a means of survival, the older brothers and sisters were incorporated as surrogate parents for their younger siblings, we now know how that worked out. Other family members were drawn in, as well as church members. All pitched in to help this family promote their family and beliefs on national television, at the same time ignoring the rot at the core of the family. All of this effort so that Michelle could act as a human pez dispenser, popping out babies as fast as she could. I know my brain works funny, but, the thought of one cold with nineteen runny noses to wipe freaks me out. The idea that you might have a family with a stomach issue trying to all use the bathroom at the same time is mind boggling. I guess the good news for the males is that the boys have first dibs on everything, which I expect would include the toilet. 

How much collusion the “Touching Little Children” network has in Duggar behavior is speculative, but, who would have watched a show called “17 Kids And Quitting”? It seems to me that the orchestration of births, weddings and more births, should not be something that a “reality TV” should be involved in. Is it moral, who can say? All we can do is look at the fallout from having the families secrets publicly disclosed and wonder if the Duggars wouldn’t have been better off left undisturbed in the wilds of Arkansas. Do the sisters who were duggared feel any better about their lives now that the whole world knows what happened? Do the husbands of the married duggared sisters feel cheated? Should there be a reduction in dowery? Will the duggared unmarried sisters be able to attract mates, and if so, of the high moral order that Jim Bob requires? Will the molested babysitter be compensated by the courts for her duggaring and will she be known as damaged goods to the holier than thou community? Will the older sister ever be allowed to marry and leave to lead her own life, or will she be forever kept in the compound as the spinster caretaker? Will any of the children be given the opportunity to attend an accredited college and given the chance to better their lot? Will Josh’s wife have the courage to divorce Josh and refuse visitation of the children?

So many questions, and only one answer so far, TLC, leave the production of shows about families to someone else, your record is tainted. My stepdad George used to say, “we’re all sinners, but there’s just two kinds of us, the caught and the uncaught”. My worldview is not that cynical. I certainly don’t think that the children should be made to pay for the sins of their father, and as Mulva points out, possibly their mother. TLC definitely needs to be held accountable, though, and I hope everyone boycotts their shows.

Well, it’s late and this “week in perversity” has thankfully come to an end. There’s nothing worse than hurting children and I had a lot of energy built up that needed releasing. I’m a little better now.

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Duggaring II

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. The weather has abated somewhat and we’re experiencing highs in the 80’s instead of the 90’s. I can be outside now for two hours before needing to change my sweat soaked underwear. Changing clothes every half hour was creating a strain on the laundromat, not to mention my quarter stack. It’s important to have good hygiene, though. 

Speaking of hygiene, I’ll continue my rant from yesterday about the Duggar family in general and Josh Duggar specifically. Anybody that knows anything about addictions, and I mean drink, drugs, gambling, sex, porn, whatever, knows that for the addict to continue on their course there has to be what are called “enablers”. Enablers are people that either out-right help the addict pursue their vice of choice, or passively turn a blind eye to their actions and allow the addict to continue on. Sometimes enablers get fed up and come together to stage what is called an intervention. The intervention lets the addict know that the people who have been supporting his behavior are not going to support it anymore. In the case of Josh Duggar, I see lots of enablers, and no intervention. The financial enabler, TLC, did not do proper vetting of the family or they would have found that Josh was already a criminal before the first episode aired.

TLC, the network producing the show, apparently did not vet the family at all. The “Touching Little Children” network has a bad history with regard to pedophiles, see “Honey Boo Boo”, “Sons of Guns”, “Cheer Perfection”, and “Cake Boss”. The show “Toddlers and Tiaras” was based on prepubescent children being paraded in adult costumes flaunting their sexuality. One has to ask the question if someone at TLC has a problem and they are acting out using the airwaves. If not, someone should have dug a little deeper early on and never allowed this bunch of hypocrites on the air. The fame and fortune provided by TLC was a huge enabler to the Duggar clan and Josh specifically. Josh was able to parlay his fame into a Washington Lobbyist job that promoted family values. Irony ? “Incest is the game the whole family can play”.

Josh lived in a hyper-sexual environment without a normal outlet. When I say hyper-sexual, I mean that from the time that the kids learn where babies come from, they knew that that old billy goat Jim Bob was “loving” Michelle, how much of it took place in front of the kids has not been reported. Michelle’s health, or even the health of the baby didn’t weigh as heavily on Jim Bob’s actions as his desires. (addict?) We know Jim Bob’s motivation was to overpopulate the acolytes of all of the other religious persuasions with his own sycophants. We know that Jim Bob’s daughters were taught a total submissive role to males, and the males must have been taught their dominance of the females. We can surmise that within this environment of  hyper-sexuality that when Josh hit puberty, he probably had some issues. Instead of being able to have a girl friend to satisfy his “too curious about girls” nature, he was forced to seek answers with his siblings. The “too curious about girls” description came from two of his victims in an interview on Faux News. The statement places the sisters in a unique position, victims and enablers.

The details in the police report about how Josh molested his sisters reminds me of the movie “Tommy”. The trusted babysitter, Uncle Ernie, would act out his perversion while the Who sang, “Down with the bedclothes, up with the nightclothes, fiddling about, fiddling about. ” Like Uncle Ernie, Josh got found out and the measures taken by the parents to protect the girls and get help for their son make the most simple minded parent want to scream “balderdash” at the top of their lungs. Locking the girls in their room at night didn’t prevent Josh from duggaring his five year old sister while he read her a book as she sat naked in his lap. Locking the girls in their room at night didn’t prevent Josh from violating a babysitter who had fallen asleep on the sofa.

I guess marrying Josh off as soon as they could did remove him from focusing on his sisters for satisfaction, we hope. Josh and his wife moved to Washington, D.C. to pursue his job of telling other people how to live as Christians. Josh, however, lived by a different set of standards. We learned this week that apparently being married to just one woman wasn’t enough, as Josh’s name was exposed as a member of Ashley Madison, a hookup site for married people. In spite of attempting to best his old man in the baby making record, and preaching long and hard about how the rest of us should live our lives, Josh still found the time to seek out lonely married women and offer them comfort as only a Duggar man can.

Well, I see by the Dr. Pepper clock it’s 1:15, I’ve got to wrap this one up. I don’t know that I’m finished with it yet. This is some bunch of sick puppies!

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Duggaring

BudLiteGood morning, y’all. If you’ve followed my blog since the beginning you know I’ve got some fairly interesting kin folks, and a family dynamic that defies description. But, rest assured, I’ll keep trying. One tale that I can’t relate about my family is incest. A lot of mountain insiders say that incest is the game the whole family can play, but not the Lites.

To that end let me give my two cents about the second most famous family in America, the Duggars. I’m giving first place to the Kardashians because for some reason America needs to know every detail Kardashian, even to whether this dress or that dress makes Kim’s butt look big. Couldn’t we all agree that Kim has a big butt, and it looks big in every dress she tries on, and just move on?

Anyway, we’re here to talk about the number two family, the Duggars. In case you’ve been living in a cave, or Alabama, the Duggars are the Arkansas family that can’t take Nancy Reagan’s advice and just say “no”. They’ve got nineteen kids, all with surnames that begin with “J”, and as the show says, they’re still counting. I’m reminded of the one liner attributed to Groucho Marx  on “You Bet Your Life”, when Groucho was interviewing a lady who had six or  seven kids. Groucho supposedly said something like, “I love my cigar but I take it out of my mouth every now and then”. All kidding aside, there are so many Duggar issues that fly in the face of reason, logic, humanity and just general health that it’s hard to pin down one to focus on. Fortunately, the eldest son Josh has provided us a jumping off point.

In case you’ve missed the show, the Duggars are a home-schooling, Bible thumping, “everybody but me is a sinner” family living in Tonitown, Arkansas. Now Tonitown is not as isolated as Nunsuch, Ga., it lies between Fayetteville where the University of Arkansas resides and Bentonville where Walmart’s home office directs the sales of everything to everybody in the world. There are educated people in the area, and obviously a great number of people with a high level of sophistication. The Duggars chose to isolate their children from the world and keep them ignorant to any opposing view to their “Quiverfull Movement” viewpoint. The Quiverfull Movement is a pyramid scheme where the fathers in a family take it upon themselves to change the world by overpopulating it with sycophants. The sycophants breed, all pay homage back to the paternal unit. The women are kept “barefoot and pregnant” as the saying goes, and are only allowed to fulfill the role of mother and dutiful wife. Work outside the home is forbidden for the woman, but who could hold down a job with more than three kids, much less nineteen? Jim Bob, the patriarch of the family, apparently performed his role well. Uncle Ebb’s phrase, “hornier than a three balled Billy Goat”, seems to apply here. In Jim Bob’s defense to being nothing more than a stud, I did see him tell the television camera one time that “he made sure to spend a half and hour with each child individually each week”. So, mama Michelle is always pregnant and Jim Bob has only got a half an hour availability each week, who’s minding the kids? Turns out the kids are.

The police reports published earlier this year specify that for about a three year period, older brother Josh diddled his younger sisters, one of whom was five at the time. Josh seems to have ignored the sister closest to his own age, but did catch another unidentified female who was babysitting. Lest we say that this is a normal example of kids playing doctor, which kids do, Josh was fourteen when it started, and fifteen when he diddled the five year old. This is not a six and seven year old playing doctor, this is not a case of “being too curious about girls” as some of his victims recited on Faux News, this is child abuse.

To make Lite of the situation, I will forever change the term diddling to Duggaring, it seems like they’ve earned the scorn. Well, it’s late and I really need a shower and probably a call to my sponsor. I thought I could get it all out in one blog, but we’re going to have to continue this one another time.