Go Ahead, Fellow Americans. Make My Day.

Just Do It.

Hotclue, who loves y’all, and will be off to the voting booth in a few hours now.

(Your regularly scheduled blogs will return this coming weekend, I promise.)

Furiously Blogging on This Saturday, November 4, 2006

I’m getting toothaches from gritting my teeth to keep from spouting off over the upcoming mid-term election next week. I can barely keep my mouth shut on SO many issues I have valid comments about, that have me SO boiling hot I may have to enter rehab myself to recover from it after the election, but I truly don’t want to offend anyone who reads this blog because I love y’all, you KNOW I do. So I’m going to control myself this weekend and restrict myself to only one small sentence:

Three. More. Days.

Thank you for somewhat allowing me to have my say.
Hotclue Herself

Hotclue to George:

I’ve read quite a bit of advice about author blogs recently. Some say, “For God’s sake, don’t blog about politics!”

Well, why not, as long as you keep your nagging bi-partisan. We have minds too, some damn fine ones, in fact. And this is the US of A. We get to speak up if we want. Besides, always blogging about nothing BUT writing is preaching to the choir if a writer’s reading it, and maybe boring as hell to civilians who read it.

As y’all already know, I’m a different kind of blogger. I’m like that man in Alabama who does a one-man, one-block parade every St. Patrick’s Day. He does his thing, has fun doing it and everybody around him has fun. Hotclue does her thing and has fun doing it, and hopefully gets the same results. Hopefully.

This morning I was watching the Sunday Morning shows–Prime Time for Politicians, I call it, although Face the Nation and Meet the Press are what the television networks call it. I watch them every Sunday whether I want to or not, since Beth and I are, so to speak, joined at the hip.

This morning I came up with an idea I’d like our President to at least consider, regarding what to do about Iraq. Not that he asked me, you understand. And not at ALL that I’m taking the Iraq situation lightly. I’m definitely not or I wouldn’t be concerned enough to blog about it. But I was thinking–as I told you before, I do that sometimes.

Anyhow. People are saying, here lately, “Mr. President, tell the Iraquis it’s their country, and either they get their act together and run it or we’re leaving.” But nobody ever tells him exactly how he should do that and my take is, he’s fumbling around with the wrong people for advice.

BUT: Hotclue To the Rescue! So listen up, George, honey:

First, invite all of their newly-elected officials to the White House. Send Air Force One after them. If there’s not enough room, send the other Air Force One, too. We know you have more than one.

Pick them up in stretch limos at Andrews Field. Have the drivers go really slow all through DC, but not because we want them to be jealous of what we have. (After all, we don’t want to remind them that we sort of messed up their country ourselves, either. I know, I know, we’re repairing things as fast as we can. But still.)

We just want them to see for themselves what they CAN have if they’ll just stop screwing around fighting each other over things like oil–ummmm, on second thought, maybe we shouldn’t mention the word “oil”. My point is, maybe they need to be made a little more aware of what democracy really can bring to the table if they’ll just settle down and help it happen, and seeing it first hand should help.

Hold a huge state dinner for them. Don’t forget to tell the chef what kind of food they like. No pork, I think–probably lamb, but the chef can check all that out. (Just eat it, it won’t kill you.) After dinner have some entertainment, but no Can-Can dancers or anything like that, remember what happened with Kruschev. If you don’t, there must be a history book in the White House to remind you.

Next morning hold a big televised meeting. Make sure everyone is there.

THEN tell them, “Folks, Iraq is YOUR country. We don’t want it. We want you to take over and control it yourselves, folks, we really do. We went over there and got rid of Saddam and Icky and Ucky for you. Now it’s time for us to leave you alone.

We want to be out of there by December. We want our guys to come home home and take care of our own bad guys, because we do have them. But if you’re going to take over in Iraq, stop fighting with each other and go after your BAD GUYS, for Allah’s sake! (A little diplomacy helps here, George. Allah is what they call Him even if you do call Him God. Give them Allah, it can only help.)

Then tell them that if they can control the people who want to create carnage every time we even TRY to rebuild anything for them, we’ll finish the job, but ONLY if we can rebuild in peace. If we can’t, then we’re sorry but adios, fix it yourselves.

Here’s the reason I’m speaking directly to you, George, honey. You can’t keep sending your number two people over there to do this for you. This message needs to be delivered with some teeth, and although Condy clearly has teeth, her message isn’t getting through. You need to do this yourself. If you do, this should accomplish two things.

First, as long as you don’t let anybody brag about anything we have, just feed ‘em well, then say what you’ve got to say so they know you mean it, they might listen. At the very least it’ll give them something solid to think about, rather than vapor-talk like, “We plan on sometime in the near future starting to wind down the number of our troops,” which says nothing.

Second, it’ll get US off your back because we’ll believe you mean it too, if you bring them here and do it on our territory like I told you. It could be a real historic moment for you and we know how much you love historic photo shoots.

In short, ya gotta do this yourself.

I guess that’s about it for today, folks, but don’t go making up any Hotclue for President campaign posters any time soon, please. First I’d have to see how much money I can raise and I think Hillary’s already got me beat there.

Ta ta till oh, Wednesday night, Thursday or so. Beth and I have a book to finish and we’re almost there. I PROMISE to talk about writing next time, even if it’s boring. Which it won’t be. After all, remember, this is Hotclue Live.

Love y’all. Even George. Even Dick.
Hotclue

Flogging the Mattress

I see some of our illustrious U.S. Senators have decided they’d rather not have any outside monitoring as far as all the nice trinkets and campaign donations they receive from their lobbyist friends. They’d much rather, thank you very much, do the monitoring and punishing all by themselves.

Hmmmmm.

You know what this reminds me of? I thought about this last night and I still think it this morning, so hey, it makes sense to me. It reminds me of a bunch of little boys about six years old with bags of rocks hidden in their toyboxes where their mamas won’t notice.

Here’s how I see it:

The little boy gets caught throwing a rock at the little girl he adores. He knows he shouldn’t do it but he does it anyway because he thinks nobody will see him do it. Someone calls his mama and tells her. She meets him at the door when he comes home and tells him he should go find a stick and take it into his room and spank himself with it.

The little boy goes outside, picks up a stick, goes back into the house and shows it to his mama.

“See, Mama, I’m going to punish myself, just like you said!”

“Good boy,” she says. “Go on in your room and take care of it, I’m too busy to think about it right now, but I’m sure you’ll do a good job of it. Just make sure you never play with any more rocks, you hear me?”

He smiles and heads for his bedroom. “Yes, Mama. I hear you.”

He goes into his room and closes the door. He takes the stick and starts flogging his mattress with it, all the time yelling and hollering to beat the band.

He makes so much noise anyone would think he was really punishing himself.

But the whole time he’s thinking about that bag of rocks in his toybox. The hidden ones nobody knows about. The nice ones.

He wants those rocks, oh, yes he does. Every single one of them. The big ones and the little ones. Every. Single. One. And he intends to have them all. But first, he flogs his mattress and yells–loud–for a few more minutes.

Finally he comes out and says, “I’m through punishing myself now, Mama. I won’t do it any more!”

“That’s a good boy,” she says, pleased to hear he’s responding so well to monitoring himself and administering his own punishment.

The little boy smiles to himself and heads back to his room…and his toybox.

Get what I’m saying here? Yes? No?

Hotclue’s take: There are just some things people shouldn’t be doing for themselves.

Love y’all,
Hotclue

You Just Can’t Make These Things Up

Hi there!
I promised to blog every Wednesday and Saturday, didn’t I, unless I was busy. Well, I’m busy today, keeping track of Beth because she’s not capable of keeping track of herself right now. She’s getting so close to the end of our new book, THE SCOUTMASTER’S WIFE, that she’s making everyone who knows her crazy because nothing seems to matter except getting to The End. I guess she wants to find out what happens herself, as much as I do, and as we both hope you will when the book comes out.

Meantime, I thought I’d put this in my blog today because I was thinking about it while I sat with Beth, who was, as usual, zoning in on the news stations this morning. Gosh darn, seems like we’re just finding out the White House wasn’t aware we were giving a huge SECURITY CONTRACT to a company in one of the mideastern countries that, rumor has it, has in the past (goshohgollygeewhiz, is this POSSIBLE?) given money to various terrorist organizations.

With that in mind, I want to share with you my all-time favorite quote, spoken by our own Donald Rumsfeld during a press conference a few years ago. This has got to be the most masterful piece of dissemination I’ve ever heard, stunning in its simplicity and effectiveness.

What it did, of course, was baffle the White House Press Corps so much that they couldn’t do anything but sit there and mull over what he’d just said, while Rumsfeld tap danced and did even more of his Show Biz slight-of-hand tricks.

I love to watch him because he’s just so damn much fun to watch. On a slow news day, always call a press conference with Donald Rumsfeld. He’ll jazz your day up fast.

In this case, Donald had just been asked a question about who knew what when over something that had happened or was happening somewhere. I heard it, but I have to admit I was so enchanted with his answer (below) that I couldn’t do anything but sit there and scream-laugh, so I forgot the question.

Anyhow, here’s his answer, worthy of a NY Times column all by itself. I hope you love this as much as I do:

“As we know, there are known knowns.
There are things we know we know.
We also know there are known unknowns.
That is to say, we know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns,
The ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
………Feb. 12, 2002, Donald Rumsfeld, Department of Defense news briefing

Isn’t it gorgeous? Folks, you just can’t make these things up.

Ta Ta till Saturday!
Love, Hotclue