It is now officially the “Dog Days of Summer” here in Alabamaland. And even though I recently pledged not to talk any more about the private sex lives of politicians and to focus instead on substantive issues in the news — such as why Karl Rove is still running from a Congressional subpoena and for some reason is still avoiding testifying under oath — it is obvious from the e-mail lists and other blogs that people would rather talk about sex.

Troy University

Now this may just be an unfortunate Freudian slip, but here’s the cutline according to Troy: J.W. Godwin, a junior broadcast journalism major from Greenville, is dubbed Homecoming King by Governor Bob Riley during homecoming festivities. Riley had promised during his first campaign to crown queen each year at TROY.

And with the release yesterday of the U.S. Justice Department Inspector General’s report on how under President George W. Bush, all things including sexual preferences were “on the table” for the past seven and a half years, even when it came to appointing judges and career prosecutors, what the heck. Let’s talk about sex.

In light of the report, it should have come as no shock that John McCain’s presidential election team scrubbed any mention of Alabama Attorney General Troy King from their Website two weeks ago, considering the rumors about his sex life. And it’s no real shocker that Republicans are distancing themselves from Troy “Toy Boy” King now, who has still not officially denied the story.

As we learn from reading the report, one of the most shocking revelations is that even the rumor of being gay wiped out any chance of lawyers being hired by the Bush Justice Department, even if it was a violation of ethics, policy, and law. I mean we already knew this administration, staffed by Federalist Society lackeys, didn’t care about the rule of law. But get this.

It wasn’t just Democrats who Monica Goodling was trying to rid the Justice Department of. If you were gay — or even rumored to be gay — your career was in jeopardy, according to the TPMMuckraker.

In Gonzales’ DOJ, Lesbian Rumors Could Cost You Your Job

And:

In the absence of a more substantial explanation from the justice Department for Chiara’s firing, it’s not unreasonable to wonder if the rumors of her lesbian relationship with Hagen led to Chiara’s downfall, too.

As a Republican source told NPR, “To some people, that’s [being gay is] even worse than being a Democrat.”

According to the blogger who has had the most fun with King, Loretta Nall, “supporters who were defending King a few weeks ago on blogs all across Alabama have been dead silent.”

There is definitely a lot of something to this Troy King story. I want to know what J.W. Godwin does that qualifies him to make $57,504 of Alabama taxpayer money a year. Does he carry suitcases real well when he and Troy travel together? Does he make a mean cup of coffee?

What is meant by “he acts as a liaison between the Attorney General and the ’staff’?”

(I bet the reporters were giggling their butts off when Chris Bence gave them that line…I know it about did me in when I read it.)

Does it mean he is just a high-priced gopher who scurries between offices to deliver donuts? What exactly does he do to earn that much cash?

And Chris Bence. Another guy with a broadcast background now in the position of paralegal….with no paralegal training. I can see how Bence could be hired into a position as spokesperson….but if what we have seen out of him so far regarding this story is the best that he can do then….WOW….just wow!!

I mean if someone were paying me $104,000 a year to be their media person I think I could come up with something better than “What about the children” and “JW is near indispensable.”

According to sources in Montgomery who know Mr. King well, there is still a debate going on about the best political strategy. One key endorser of King who knows him well has advised a policy of silence, especially if there is truth to the story.

Remember what happened to Gary Hart in the 1980s when he denied the rumors of an affair and challenged reporters to follow him around? Do you remember the boat Monkey Business and the National Enquirer photo of him and Donna Rice? Whoops!

Some supporters have advised King to issue a firm denial, sources say, but they know that would immediately result in a story in every newspaper and TV news show in the state. And what if there are reporters in Montgomery who know more than they have reported to date (which is zilch)?

Monkey Business indeed…

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, “Let there be light: and there was light.”
- Genesis, 1:1-1:3

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

In the beginning there was no such place called Alabama. It didn’t come along until much later.

After a time it was populated with the poor people of Appalachia, however, along with some rich carpet baggers from up North, quite a number of African slaves — and there were those Cherokee, too — but the light didn’t quite reach all the way down South to shine on the good people who sprang from the dust of the Earth there.

So eventually God got around to creating newspapers to give them some light, but that light sometimes hurt their heads when they tried to read it.

Then God created talk radio and Rush Limbaugh was born. And Rush Limbaugh declared that newspapers were “liberal,” which became a bad word like “Communist” or “New Yorker” or “intellectual.”

Afraid that radio or TV might finally put newspapers out of business, God created Si Newhouse to give the people of Alabama a “conservative” press that would reinforce their racist, homophobic stereotypes about the world, just like radio.

But God was not satisfied with everything in his creation, since some of his people actually voted for a Democrat for president, Bill Clinton, in 1992. So he allowed a politician named Al Gore to invent the “Internets,” a newfangled way to hook up a computer to a phone line and reach out and touch other computers.

Since God sometimes has a sense of humor, just like man who he created in his very own image, God also created Matt Drudge. And he was one smart cookie, this Drudge, a humble T-shirt salesman, who learned how to exploit the Internets for profit.

Drudge posted all these headlines linked to stories written by real journalists, and he was a lot like Rush Limbaugh. Only instead of talking about the evils of the world such as “liberals” on the radio, he liked to post headlines from actual newspaper reporters on something called the World Wide Web, which was hooked up to the Internets.

His headlines tended to be very sensational and scandalous, sort of like tabloid newspapers. The biggest story he broke that made him famous involved the private sex life of a politician. In fact he heard from a source that President Bill Clinton was having oral sex with a willing intern in the White House, and he declared that was bad.

God likes heterosexual sex, mind you. He created sex so people could procreate and multiply and OVER populate the Earth.

But he only wants man to have sex with one woman at a time, his wife, and never with another man, at least according to Limbaugh and Drudge and others like them, like Alabama’s very own attorney general, Troy King.

God also created conservative members of Congress to impeach this sinner Bill Clinton and try to drive him from the White House.

Of course that didn’t work, because one of God’s fallen angels, a powerful force called “Satan” — aligned with evil creatures called Democrats — prevented it.

Then in the year 2000, God was not pleased with Al Gore for his invention of the Internets, so God blessed a not so smart or humble fellow from down in Texas named George W. Bush. And God, with the help of some of his many minions at churches across America, as well as the Supreme Court, helped Bush steal the election away from bad old liberal Al Gore.

Even though “thou shalt not steal” was one of God’s 10 commandments, he let some people get away with it from time to time — just to spite the old Devil.

God’s most powerful angel was not happy with the way Bush used his political offices to reward giant oil companies and insurance companies or Vice President Dick Cheney’s buddies in the contracting business, and he was not happy with how Bush allowed the federal government to spy on his people.

So he invented blogs.

And these blogs, which are published on the Web and read by people connected to the Internets, are written by a subclass of humans called “bloggers,” who tend to shine a lot more light on things than perhaps God had originally intended.

For in the beginning, when He warned man and woman not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden, God had wanted his people to be happy. He knew that “ignorance is bliss.”

But God had created man, and woman from his rib (with lots of barbecue sauce), to naturally have a certain curiosity about the world. So they ate the fruit anyway and figured out they were not wearing any clothes.

At first they were embarrassed about it, but later they learned what to do in their nakedness. And in the Age of the Internets, they even liked to look at other people naked on their computers sometimes, which was against God’s “commandments” handed down a few thousand years ago by a man named Moses. The practice was called “lust,” and even though God created man with a genetic tendency to do it so he could propagate his species, God still thought it was bad.

Now along the way in human history, you must understand, God has also created men called prophets, who foresaw the end of the world coming one day. They wrote their predictions in God’s book, called The Holy Bible.

And while he was not one of God’s smartest creatures, George W. Bush sort of thought he was a prophet. So after Sept. 11, 2001, when Satan’s own people, the radical Muslim “terrorists,” attacked New York and Washington, Mr. Bush figured it was time to bring about the end of God’s creation.

For every good Christian dreams of the day when the world will come to an end and hopes to be alive to see it happen.

For one of the great stories in the only true book tells the story of The Rapture, an event that is supposed to take place right before the end, when God will take a few good men with him who attended only the right churches. They will be carried up into the sky without having to die. What a way to go. I wonder if they will be snorting cocaine and drinking Crown?

The end had been predicted, after all, in The Bible, the only irrefutable book in publishing history filled with not one single contradiction in its philosophy. And the end was talked about quite a lot in a set of books called the Left Behind series, written by some of God’s own designated true intellectuals. In the books, they explained exactly what was going to happen in the end, and Bush was convinced.

So he attacked this place called Iraq, where some of the early battles in the Bible took place. It was also a place with lots of oil, which man used to fuel his cars, the primary vehicle for moving him through rush hour traffic from one side of the cities to the other — to work in low paying jobs.

And the world was running out of oil, so Bush had to try to grab all of it for God’s people, “the American people.”

And now that the world is facing its final war, which will soon involve another country called Iran, Mr. Bush likes to spend most of his time riding bicycles like a teenager. His many helpers, such as his aide Karl Rove, who some call “Bush’s brain,” or “the architect,” continue to work hard every day trying to put the tree of knowledge genie back in the bottle.

But bloggers, who are the most evil of creatures on the planet and who have exploited this thing called knowledge to try and set men free, are onto Mr. Rove. They are chasing him around the globe and, along with a few Democrats in Washington, they are trying to put God’s chosen political operative in jail.

Now God knows jails are places made for people like former Alabama Governor Don Siegelman, not people like Mr. Bush or Mr. Rove. Congress cannot seem to get the votes together to impeach Mr. Bush, and that’s the way God wants it. Because you see, just like man, His finest creation, He wants to be there to see it all blow up and disappear too.

Gregory Heisler

E.O. Wilson’s book Naturalist tells stories about his time growing up in Alabama and getting into science…

Even though God once went to a lot of trouble getting a man named Noah to save all the creatures on the planet from a great flood, he can’t wait to see all of the creatures destroyed in a giant nuclear fire. It will be the finale of all finales, the final fantastic Fourth of July fireworks show.

And God will be pleased and he knows man will be pleased too.

God will then go out into the vast universe, aboard his invisible space shuttle, and create another world. And he will take with him a few good men, no women allowed of course, so there can be no more procreation of humans.

Because, you see, God will not include man in his next experimental design, according one of His greatest prophets.

For, while man can be very good at times, he can also be very bad.

Perhaps it would be better to let the ants run the world, God thinks, since they seem to be much better at working together.

And the ants, of course, would never read blogs or that evil online encyclopedia called Wikipedia — and get too smart for their britches.

For in the land called Alabama, that’s the greatest sin of them all.

This could make for great summer games for bloggers and the tabloids and Bush detractors everywhere.

Put Wonkette in the camp of doubters, although she did publish much of the story anyway, about the alleged affair between George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice - the African-American Secretary of State from Birmingham, Alabama.

There have been no follow-up stories in the mainstream media on this, maybe because they don’t have the video?

Bush has a long history of promoting women who sleep with him and dissing those who don’t. Just ask a certain federal judge right here in Birmingham, who dated Bush in 1972 but did not sleep with him, and was turned down in her bid to be appointed to the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta recently.

We wonder if former Bush Secretary of State Colin Powell, now back out on the speaking circuit, will have anything more to say about this. Maybe he wasn’t invited to the orgies in the Lincoln bedroom?

Little Scotty McClellan knows for sure. He was pushed out as White House spokesman because he knew too much. Last we heard, he was on the speaking circuit promoting his new book, playing it safe and protecting Bush.

Jeff Gannon knows for sure, but he’s not talking, thanks to a no doubt large under-the-table bankroll from the Bush family clean up-cover up fund.

In any event, maybe someone will ask Condi about the affair when she comes to North Carolina next week for the Southern Baptist Convention.

If no one else does it, I have it on good authority from a State Department source that Ms. Rice will be in Birmingham Sept. 24.

We also have it on good authority that the New York tabloids are putting some resources into it. Remember the Gary Hart story? The mainstream press only picked up that story after the National Enquirer broke it and ran the photo of the Monkey Business on the cover. That was the first major break in revealing the private lives of politicians, a phenomenon that has now changed the political and media landscape - at least when it comes to the affairs of Democrats.

Does anyone really believe that Republicans don’t have their own dalliances? We don’t really give a hoot who anybody sleeps with in their private lives. But when one party puts on such a show of being straight, upright Christians just to fool the masses into voting for them, their hypocrisy should be exposed - at every turn of the button.