Hell: Where You Are Judged in Run-On Sentences

Since Helen Thomas’ refuses to contribute to the arena of relevance—her column this week is about the role of the First Lady and fashion trends—I’m forced to look elsewhere for this week's Object of Ridicule and Scorn. So I looked outside the box, and found the barely-coherent Mark Morford, a SFGate columnist (Morford doesn't have the chops to make it into the print edition of the San Francisco Chronicle, whose larger online content is under the banner of SFGate) that decided to lambast Laura Bush after her appearance on Larry King Live. It’s nice that I get to stick with Thomas’ chosen theme of first ladies. As usual, some commendations are in order. Good for Morford for not pulling any punches. The guy had the courage to speak his mind. Sadly, we were all forced to confront just how incoherent his mind is.

IS LAURA BUSH GOING TO HELL? By Mark Morford

And over here...

Whoa! We started already! Where’s are we? Are we taking a tour?

...we've got what we can only hope will be the final nationwide appearance of any kind whatsoever of one dangerously prim,

This must be a reference to the fearsome "dangerously prim" Jane Austen terrorist cell. They've trained in the secluded boutiques of southern Britain to kill you 26 ways with a Tiffany silver salad fork.

...heavily shellacked Laura Bush, trotting herself out like some sort of equestrian trophy

Equestrians prizes are generally ribbons, not trophies, though neither ribbons nor trophies actually trot. I think he got the trophy confused with the horse. Is it just me, or does this guy sound like he didn't get sporting awards growing up?

on Larry King Live to shill for her new book, "Shut Up and Sit Quietly, You're Just a Woman" -er, "Spoken from the Heart."

Now that’s some pretty lazy journalism to get the name of the book wrong and then not go back and fix it…oh he was making a point! Republican women are universally self-loathing, because, of course, Republicans hate women. Profound…and well-reasoned.

Verily, it was on the advice of a handful of brave readers that I forced myself to watch 

A point of agreement! One needs to be coerced to watch Larry King. And stop using a thesaurus to write your column.

the clip in which Laura, looking increasingly extraterrestrial

I get that you’re uncomfortable with women, but most of us had ditched the idea that they were aliens by the 2nd grade.

and translucent,

Are these just random adjectives, or is does he think Laura Bush is an alien ghost?

responds to a couple of Larry's mildly loaded questions by blinking a few times and then humbly, quietly, rather sheepishly

Alien ghost-sheep!

admitting that, yes, she is, in fact, both pro-abortion rights and pro-gay marriage, and apparently has been for just about ever. You read that right.

Yes, yes. We’re all surprised that the GOP isn't an ideological monolith.

Well now. Here is where I would like to say that I stood up and screamed.

Save it for football season, butch.

Here's where I sort of expect myself to write that I leaped up in my chair and hurled something heavy at the screen with a full-throated "What the f-- did you just say?!!" and then curse her in a hundred dialects for her pathetic decade of cruel silence and offensive passivity.

Offensive passivity? In addition to being cumbersome verbiage, it’s just contradictory.

I didn't do any of that. 

He just expects himself to write autobiographical falsehoods and fantasies. He should really be commended for his restraint. It would have been so compelling for a journalist to lie about his own reaction to Laura Bush on Larry King Live. (Although, sarcasm aside, it couldn't be less interesting than his actual reaction.)

All I did was sigh and shake my head in compassionate disgust,

Does this guy think that pairing words with opposing meanings makes him sound deep? Compassionate disgust is about as coherent as blatant subtlety, enlightened ignorance, or offensive passivity. One of those sounds familiar…

as a tremor of deep pain shot through my heart,

That sounds like a heart attack. Definitely not compassion or disgust. You should probably get that checked out.

WATCH OUT FOR THE COMMA SPLICE!

a visceral cringe in honor of 

You honor by cringing? I guess that sheds some light on why liberals cringe at the sight of Old Glory and the sound of the pledge of allegiance.

all the suffering,

Whose suffering?

Sadness

Whose sadness?

and loss

What loss? Is he even going to try to support these random ideas?

Laura Bush could've have helped alleviate,

Snarkiness aside, implying that Laura Bush, by being silent on abortion and gay marriage, has committed an act of atrocity of inaction tantamount a citizen that fails to act in defense of the victim of a crime, is nonsensical, libelous, and repugnant.

even just a little, had she brains enough, and balls.

I’m very worried that this guy still hasn’t figured out basic female anatomy.

But just so we're clear on some details, oh sweet, pitiable Laura:

He’s talking directly to Laura Bush now?

You had, back in 2000, two young, party-riffic

Party-riffic is meant to clarify things?

twentysomething daughters, 

I'm sorry, this is anything but clear.

you were, for better or worse, 

This is going to be another run-on sentence, isn't it?

the default role model for women everywhere, you were the emblem for female freedom and feminine empowerment to a hundred nations, and you... did whatnow?

It's worth noting that this sentence has a colon, an ellilpse, three made up words, and a grand total of three separate comma splices. I'm going to print this sentence out, do a little decoupage, and then send it in to the Guinness Book to contend for the world record for the most dazzling display of professional incompetence this year.

Lied outright? Lived in quiet denial? Slaughtered your own core beliefs? 

This guy really confuses passivity with offensiveness…

Kept your second-class Southern wife mouth

Southern wife mouth? Do either of those adjectives actually modify the noun? Southern Wife Mouth sounds like the title of a NEA-funded postmodernist photograph of a transient crapping on an Elvis Presley LP.

shut tight and sat by quietly while the men did the "real" thinking?

Nevermind that the Bush cabinet featured a prominent woman like Condoleezza Rice (and others in the less important departments) and there was an entire congressional class of women who were actually elected to represent the views of women. Laura, by comparison, was only there because she was married to the President.

You sacrificed your own daughters to the sweaty altar of Karl Rove

Is the altar sweaty, or is Karl Rove? It’s a moot point, this guy clearly doesn’t understand how to properly use an adjective. Nevertheless, if the sweaty altar demanded virgins, that ship sailed for the Bush twins long ago.

and the fundamentalist anti-choicers?

I understand the need to vilify opponents in the abortion debate because the debate by necessity defies reason. On both sides. Still, détente has been reached, probably because liberals don’t think it’s a good P.R. play to identify as “anti-lifers.” That said, if Morford wants to play that game, I’m game.

I see.

Oh sweet Laura, it is very likely you are going to hell.

I didn’t think liberals believed in hell.

Look, I don't care if Dick Cheney threatened you with razor wire and concrete pumps.

Razor wire is a defensive augmentation to a barrier, usually a chain link fence. It is completely worthless as a threat. I think this goes back to Morford’s confusion between aggression and passivity, offense and defense. Watching a football game with this guy would be hilarious.

I don't care if Karl Rove said he'd suffocate you with his giant clammy hog thighs

Ah, clammy hog thighs. Thighs sharing the attributes of both a clam and a hog, who, as we all know, are very close cousins in the animal kingdom. 

He's taken on both Cheney and Rove...he can hit the Bush Administration trifacta if he can work in Rumsfeld!

if you dared to speak up. You did a violent

I’m about to get violent if Morford confuses aggression and passivity again.

disservice, even outright harm, to women the world over, for nearly a decade.

This is, as best I can tell, Morford's central thesis. We're pretty well along here, and the hack has yet to even attempt to defend this baseless accusation beyond the non-sequitur that Laura Bush is a role model and therefore must be compelled to give factual information about her personal stance on abortion and gay marriage. Is Morford also upset that we don't know anything about Laura Bush's position on U.S.-Tajik relations or the appropriateness of Federal Reserve open market operations under Bernanke? Or do abortion and gay rights hold special claims to the opinions of first ladies? If so, why? Is it because they're women and all the other complicated non-feeling oriented issues should be left to the men who do the "real" thinking?

You helped allow virulent homophobia to rage in the nation

Virulent? Virulence implies an epidemic of violence and destruction (and not passive violence). I’m suddenly wishing that some government entity would license adjectives.

and in your own husband's tiny soul,

I didn't think liberals believed in souls.

when you were in an insanely unique, privileged position to a stand,

First, this guy needs a better editor, because someone missed a word. Moving on from butchering adjectives to butchering adverbs isn't exactly progress. Did Morford write this column in his trapper-keeper and doodle little hearts around Obama's name?

even a modest one, and help defy a deep hatred and ignorance in this country.

Saying that this country is hateful and ignorant towards gay rights issues over and over again doesn’t make it true. Conflating ignorance with opposition, however, does strike me as angry and uninformed.

I'm not suggesting you had to become the spokeswoman for Planned Parenthood. 

Huh? I thought we were still on the gay marriage thing. He’s really bouncing around.

I'm not saying you had to become a raging activist, a feminist icon. I know, as a Southern wife, you were trained from fetushood

Even if it's meant to be ironic--which is still a toss-up--Morford hasn't shown the fluency with the English language (presumably his native tongue) to pull off this little maneuver. In a column in which the author decries a former first lady for failing to promptly voice her support for the right to destroy a fetus, he also humanizes a fetus and endows it with the ability to be learn. Morbid.

to stand by your man and never, not ever, speak against him or make him look like an idiot. But they say, Laura, that behind every great man is a great woman. George Bush was a small-minded, incompetent puppet.

We get it. You’re spiteful. It is astounding that this is the type of vitriol Morford can scrounge up. It's not like George Bush is personally responsible for him being a crappy writer.

Shall we guess what that makes you?

You shouldn’t. You’re going to say offensively passive again, aren’t you?

All right, enough of Laura. 

and enough of Mark. From here, he gets less and less coherent and far less interesting, despite mentioning orgasms, blowjobs, erotic dreams, rape fantasies, good porn, respectful raunch, and some pretty self-righteous criticisms of amateur blogging from a guy who has the eloquence and acumen for articulation of Shaquille O’Neil.

…Blah blah blah. Boring boring boring…

…oh wait, he comes back around to interesting stuff.

There's a point in all this, somewhere.

Don't lie. The only point of this article is that we should be teaching better grammar and sentence composition in San Francisco public schools?

Oh, right: role models.

That's not a sentence.

Women. Sex. Responsibility. Empowerment.

Burrito. Cantankerous. Dionysus. Guadalcanal.

Where to find? Where do you seek? 

What the fuck are these, because they're sure as hell not English?

Chen was supposedly a role model to overanxious Harvard freshmen girls who've never swallowed.

I glossed over it when he talked about Chen and her sex life. She was boring. So was he.

Laura Bush was a role model for terrified Southern housewives stuck with idiot-boy husbands, 

End the sentence here!

sad, lost women who, in Laura's case anyway, could have made a real difference,

Considering that Roe v. Wade is “established law,” how could Bush—either Laura or George—have made a difference in what is now an entirely judicial matter? Moreover, public enemy #1 in the gay-marriage community, the Defense of Marriage Act, passed overwhelmingly in 1996 under Clinton, well before Laura Bush was even in the public spotlight.

could have been downright historic,

It could have been mildly disruptive to the Bush agenda, which featured neither abortion nor gay marriage as prominent issues (although gay marriage was significant during the 2004 campaign). Calling that historic is kind of like the hyperbolic boasts of a college freshman’s “epic” night out drinking or the eulogistic nicety that Ted Kennedy was a “statesman.”

had she the slightest bit of nerve and soulful integrity.

After clauses more entangled than a Los Angeles interchange, six commas, multiple ambiguous references, three separate interjections by me, and meaningless words thrown in just for fun, the run-on sentence mercifully ends. I need something stronger than Tylenol now.

All told, there appear to be about a million examples out there of, well, what not to be. Don't be Laura. Don't be Chen. Don't for damn's sake

I get that he can’t bring himself to say “God,” but what on earth does “for damn’s sake” mean?

be anything like the half-baked treatises of Caitlin "Loving Our Inner Housewife" Flanagan, 

It seems late in the column to be bringing up entirely new ideas or references. Who the hell is Flanagan?

whose recent Atlantic piece dissecting teen sex and hookup behavior reeks of patronizing distaste for young sticky things she doesn't understand.

That sounds an awful lot like projection.

I'd suggest being more like my girl Violet, but she's pretty much one of a kind.

Which, come to think of it, might be the best advice of all.

That’s not advice at all, you inarticulate dumbass. You can’t say that you’re not offering a piece of advice, and then say that not offering that piece of advice was the best advice of all. Is anyone still wondering why no one reads the newspaper anymore?

UPDATE: Does this guy's bio give you the urge to kick a hippy in the stones or what?