ManicDDaily

Michelle Bombshell McGee

The news, lately, is full of tales of men acting like idiots.  Following up on Jon Edwards and Tiger Woods… well, following up on Bill Clinton, Elliot Spitzer, Jon Edwards, Tiger Woods, and too many others to be mentioned… (wait a second, this is news?)  Okay, okay… .  Following up on a whole bunch of idiotic famous males, the American populace now has Jesse James, cheating husband of Oscar-winning Sandra Bullock.

The media, completely sick of health care, is making a big deal of Jesse James’ betrayal of Bullock.  Is there an “Oscar Curse?” reporters ask, a curse that afflicts Best Actresses?

The reporters’ voices are somber, knowing, smug (as if to say, of course, there’s an Oscar Curse.  How can a man be expected to deal with a hard-working, super-successful, wife?)  One suspects, however, that this question is mainly an excuse to flash a backdrop of Michelle Bombshell McGee, Jesse’s lover—who, for some reason, is called the tattoo lady rather than the tattooed lady (as if she inked them on others, rather than simply had the ink covering a super-majority of her personal surface area.)

A friend has been haranguing me throughout the day with the question of how Bullock could have been stupid enough to marry someone like James in the first place.  He understands James’s defection—”a jerk is a jerk is a jerk.”  What he doesn’t understand is how someone as seemingly charming, smart and successful as Bullock could have ever married someone like James, a motorbiker reality star, the twice-married ex-husband of a porn star, a man covered with tattoos even before his trysts with the tattoo lady.

All I can come up with is low self-esteem.   But it does make me think that maybe the news is not just full of tales of men who are idiots, but women who’ve also been a bit idiotic.   Which, in turn, raises the specter of Rielle Hunter

Who now, unfortunately, feels more than comfortable talking about her affair with Johnny Edwards.  “Had I spoken [before],” Rielle says, “I would have emasculated him. And I could not emasculate him.”

Do I really need to hear this?

The Oscar Curse.  The Rielle deal.

And maybe it’s not just men and women being idiotic, but the taletellers too.   The news stories begin to seem almost Shakespearean.

But not quite.