Seriously. WTF, Over?

When something bizarre becomes reality before your very eyes, often you pause. Maybe you wince, maybe you pinch yourself to make sure you're not dreaming, or maybe you just shrug your shoulders and chock it up as another sign of the times we live in.

I'm talking about the people we empower who (sooner or later) display signs of insanity by adopting nicknames or aliases. Some are self-named and some inherit their new name from the public at large for something they said or did. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised; this happened centuries ago in America with the likes of Publius, Silence Dogood and others.

Let's take a closer look at some of them. We'll start with the latest revelation and work backwards.

Oh, Senator Mitt, er, Pierre Delecto. This is truly a WTF moment in your life if there ever was one. It wasn't enough that you occupy a position very clearly opposed to the President on just about everything, you had to add a fake voice to the conversation. Was this sour grapes for losing an election to Barack Obama that you should have won? You'll never live this one down. Pierre Delecto will be your moniker long after you're dead and buried, and the kicker is you chose it yourself. Mitt Romney will soon be forgotten, but Pierre will live on in infamy. You -do- know what infamy means, don't you? Famous for a bad reason... This one is better than strapping your dog to the roof of your car for a 12-hour vacation drive, something we learned about during your failed Presidential campaign. Thanks for the laughs, Mitt, er, Pierre.

But he's not the only elected Federal legislator to have taken a juicy alias. Anthony Weiner (remember him) chose Carlos Danger as his mask when he was sexting females with pictures of his ... muscular body, yeah, that's it. Anthony was a Congressman who was shamed out of office and then NYC Mayoral candidate until he doubled down by repeating what got him kicked out of Congress (sexting an underage teen) and ... spent a while in jail as a result. His wife (Huma, Mrs. Clinton's top aide) forgave him the first time but couldn't take the embarrassment twice, so she divorced him. I'm still trying to figure out if that was a punishment for him or not. As usual, their kid is the real victim here.

Then we move down to those representatives that earned a nickname for something they said or claimed to have done ... That list includes:

Senator Cory Booker, aka Spartacus. He brought that name upon himself when he thought his actions during the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings made him some sort of folk legend (it didn't). What Booker doesn't realize was that Spartacus may have started out with honorable intentions, but his army quickly turned into looters and pillagers and those that survived were crucified not only for being rebel warriors, but also for being thieves. On second thought, maybe there is a comparison between Booker and Spartacus's army.

Senator Elizabeth Warren, aka Fauxcahontas. She earned that nickname with her false claims of having a native American (Cherokee) bloodline, which of course a DNA test proved is completely bogus. As more documents turn up (besides her plagiarized Pow Wow Chow cookbook), it appears she used the claim to first further her career in law, then to give herself a leg up as a Professor at Harvard, and finally to get elected to the US Senate from Massachusetts. If there ever was a candidate for Masshole of the century, she'd be in the running. Of course, as she campaigns for President as a closet socialist, she keeps stacking lie upon lie as she goes. Even when her lies are debunked (the latest one being pushed out of a teaching job for being pregnant), she keeps making it up as she goes along. God help us all if this female gasbag ever makes it to the White House.

There are others. How an Irish white man in Texas gets a Latino name of Beto merits mention. Pete Buttigieg now owns the moniker Alfred E. Neuman. Hillary Clinton goes by Killary, mostly due to the surprising number of people in her circle of current or former acquaintances that suddenly and prematurely end up on a table in the morgue. And although CNN's Chris Cuomo isn't elected (big media is a power of a sort), he earned the moniker of Fredo for spazzing out on camera when somebody called him that.

If you're wondering why America is so fucked up, just take a long look at mental midgets like these with power (or formerly with power) and it should become clear to you in no time at all. You just can't make this shit up.

In Defense of Felicity Huffman

I'm not a bleeding heart liberal; in fact, I'm rather conservative. But I also understand that human beings are imperfect and sometimes we lose sight of things we shouldn't. Such is the case of actress Felicity Huffman, Hollywood celebrity and parent of college-age children. She's also politically left-leaning and isn't a big fan of Donald Trump. She pretty much fits the description of a liberal activist, if a definition were ever to be printed in a dictionary. Sitting in my ivory tower, it would be easy for me to sling ha-ha-on-you mud at her with the best of them. But I won't, and here's why.

When the college-payoff scandal broke, she was among 50 people indicted. The other high-profile couple indicted with the group was actress Lori Loughlin and her husband. They have pleaded not guilty and are fighting the charges, something I deem a major mistake. Time will tell; as my mother used to say, The wheel of justice turns slow, but it grinds exceedingly fine.

Huffman, to her credit, never uttered a word of denial. She knew what she was doing was wrong and we can safely bet that if it wasn't an act to help her daughter, she wouldn't have done it. She came to the bar with clean hands almost immediately and pleaded guilty pretty much just as fast as she could. And she made no bones about it - she publicly admitted her guilt without making excuses for her behavior.

I'm a parent myself and I know plenty of other parents who have gone a little further than they should have in acts to protect or help their children. I'm not saying I would have paid somebody off to change their grades, but I damn well used every resource at my disposal to keep them on the right path. This includes using a friendship with a local police chief while I sat on the municipal board that oversaw him to locate a runaway stepson 3000 miles away a few decades ago. I'm sure he would have investigated it anyway regardless of my position, but personal conversations letting him know his mother was besides herself over it didn't hurt either.

Some people think Huffman got off too easy. Maybe she did, maybe she didn't. Opinions vary. She was sentenced to 14 days in jail, a year of probation with 250 hours of community service and a fine of twice what she paid ($30,000). I'm not a judge and I don't know if the sentence matches the crime.

But I do know parents will go to far lengths to help their children, sometimes further than they should.

The biggest thing that motivates me to write about this is her complete and timely admission that what she did was, in fact, wrong. It demonstrates 2 things: One, she has a conscience and two, she knows she is not above John Q. Public in regards to the law.

So, Ms. Huffman, you are in jail as I write this. 14 days will probably turn out to be 10 or 11 days (I understand there are jail credits average people like me don't know about). You will have a year after that to perform your community service and report to probation as required, and that will be your real sentence. I'm reminded of a petty criminal who was our town supervisor 25 years ago and was caught using highway department employees to remodel his own house. He got community service also (besides being kicked out of office) and that was the biggest thing he hated. Friends told me he said he'd rather go to jail than have to go to the soup kitchen and hand out food. As a side bar, his crime was what motivated me to run for office and eventually serve 3 terms on the board, so I guess it wasn't all bad.

So, Ms. Huffman, while our politics are 180 degrees apart, I actually admire you for showing us how to be penitent when we screw up.

And we all have screwed up at one point or another. Somebody else said it better: Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.