The Cain Mutiny

I’m wondering who the next person to come forward to claim Herman Cain groped them and am fearful it might be me. Our paths have crossed.

Sharon Bialek says she was in Washington staying at the Capitol Hilton in 1997 when Cain made a lust-fueled lunge at her loins after drinks in the hotel bar.

The news stirred The Washington Post to write the scandal puts the Hilton in the “elite pantheon of hotels of infamy.”

To me, it’ll always be in the elite pantheon of hotels that host kids that can spell words like cymotrichous and stromuhr.

The hotel was the long-time host of the Scripps National Spelling Bee, an event I twice chaperoned to the fiscal detriment of the Nashville Banner’s profit margin. The hotel was the landmark site of my first opportunity to blow out an expense account.

Part of my “expenses” involved lobster dinners and a $90 ticket to see Charlton Heston star in “The Caine Mutiny Court Martial” at the Kennedy Center. Ronald and Nancy Reagan attended the same performance. I wrote about the whole thing here.

Remember the great 1954 movie? It starred Humphrey Bogart as Capt. Philip Queeg of the Navy minesweeper Caine. The Caine captain loses touch with reality and is eventually disgraced.

We’re today witnessing the beginnings of another Cain mutiny.

He’s finished. His campaign surge struck me as odd and an indication of how desperation is leading the GOP off the presidential cliff during what should be a gimme election.

Bialek made the charges beside her attorney, feminist crusader Gloria Allred, who should consider for reasons of accuracy changing her name to Gloria Allmakeup.

The charges seem credible. Of course, I’m a liberal Democrat, so charges against a Republican carry more weight with me than when the same charges are leveled against someone like Bill Clinton.

It’s the exact opposite with Republicans who unleash special prosecutors and moral indignation whenever a Democrat is accused of the same murky shenanigans.

Really, a more non-partisan question always pops into my head whenever I hear a woman say, as Bialek says, her date shoved one hand up her skirt while using the other to push her head into his lap.

The question is: Does that ever work?

I imagine there are women out there who’ll succumb to that sort of blunt maneuver, but I think most of them are either hookers or pancake waitresses interested in dating Tiger Woods.

I’d never dream of trying that sort of thing. I’d be terrified the woman might sever the relationship -- and I’m not just talking about the relationship between me and her.

I’m talking about the relationship between me and my tender little troublemaker.

As romantic come-ons go, it certainly lacks the subtlety and sophistication I champion.

I was advising a heartsick friend the other day that he’d never need to worry about meeting strange women -- and women who talk to friends of mine are uniformly strange -- because I authored the George Clooney of pick-up lines.

I share it because it saddens me to think of how much loneliness there is in the world and because my married butt has no use for it.

I told him to approach the most stunning woman in the room and say with utmost sincerity: “Was it as difficult for you growing up beautiful . . . as it was for me?”

It’s irresistible. It’s complimentary and manages to be simultaneously self-deprecating and egotistical.

It’s a pity I thought up that line about five years after I became a married father -- and that happily married men still spend idle hours thinking up winning pick-up lines is the reason attorneys like Allred will never be broke.

I have to admire Cain’s moxie. He’s insisting on not talking about the only thing everyone is talking about. He’s threatening to sue news organizations that report on the existence of factual documents he signed. And he’s acting like old Capt. Queeg did before the Navy instigated court martial proceedings.

I’m not saying he’s crazy, but he’s certainly engaging in calaginous behavior.

Calaginous is a Latin adjective meaning dim, murky, dark or obscure.

Care to hear it used in another sentence?

Oops. Sorry.

Oh, how the sweet sting of spelling bees past forever lingers!

Who knew lobsters and bees would be such a memorable combination?

Expense accounting the national spelling bee

In keeping with my week-old pledge to add more to the mix, this is a timely Spelling Bee rerun from 2009. The stats page told me somebody was peeking at it and thought I'd toss it up in case anyone is interested in how generous I am with other people's money.

As many Americans watched last week’s National Spelling Bee and wondered how children could correctly spell so many polysyllabic words and why most of those that do look like Mumbai extras from “Slumdog Millionaire,” I had more altruistic thoughts.

I wondered how the hundreds of children whose lives I altered for the better are doing today. I wondered how many of them have gone on to to be doctors, educators or noble philanthropists. I wondered if any of them remember me in their prayers.

You see the annual National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., has for more than 20 years been a hallmark event in my life. It’s an annual commemoration of two weeks in consecutive years when I did more good on behalf of my fellow man than the sum entirety my misspent life.

It was my first experience with an expense account and I learned something illuminating about myself.

I’m a hell of a lot of fun with someone else’s money.

I was a rookie reporter at the now-defunct Nashville Banner, and there’s a perhaps coincidental pattern of places that can be described as now-defunct that once entrusted me with the company loot.

I vividly remember the top editor approaching me while I feigned industriousness by carrying on a pretend phone interview into a dead receiver. I said a polite goodbye to the imaginary subject, set the phone down and looked up. Yes, boss?

“The guy who’s covered the National Spelling Bee for the past 10 years is sick of it. We want you to fly to Washington, chaperone our entrant and write stories about the bee,” he said.

The Banner building had no windows. One editor described days there as similar to being on board a submarine during a long voyage beneath the Arctic circle. I was always thrilled to get outside and enjoy the sweet Tennessee sunshine. That’s why I was so crushed by the boss’s offer.

I’m sorry, I said, but I just can’t afford to fly to Washington and stay in a hotel myself, let alone pay for some poindexter spelling champ.

“Idiot,” he said, “the paper pays for everything. You’ll have an expense account.”

It was a watershed moment in my life. As I’ve truthfully said many times, my idea of a splurge at the time was pizza with pepperoni and sausage. To think that I was going to be let loose in a glamorous city with ample bags of someone else’s money was like some kindly bandit had cut me in on the spree following the bank holdup, an analogy you’ll see is rather apt.

I remember checking into the Capital Hilton and finding a fully stocked bar brimming with dozens of top shelf little bottles of hootch.

Eureka! I thought. I shoveled them all into my suitcase, figuring housekeeping would assume I was a thirsty guy and would re-stock the next morning and we’d begin repeating the procedure for the next five days. And that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t know that each tiny bottle carried a $3 to $5 fee.

With a crisp $20 and bright smile, I became best friends with Pierre the hotel concierge. Over the course of the week, I had a dozen or so conversations with Pierre and every one of them included some form of the line, “Say, Pierre, where can I find the best (lobster, steak, cigars) in town.”

My father was vicariously thrilled with my experience. He called to advise me to attend the Kennedy Center premier of The Caine Mutiny Court Marshall starring Charleton Heston Henry Fonda. Pierre expertly secured me one of the scarce tickets. And this was cool -- President Reagan and wife Nancy were there, too!

My balcony seat was directly above Reagan’s box. I’ll never forget the moment he entered. More than four thousand people rose, turned toward me and began wildly applauding. From my perspective, it looked like they were looking right at me.

I felt so overcome with warmth, I couldn’t help myself. I waved and took a little bow.

Really, after four days on the expense account, word could have gotten around and they may have been applauding for me and not Reagan. As a representative of the Banner, I felt it would have reflected poorly on the institution if I was a cheap tipper, even if the pious old prick who owned the place was a notorious cheapskate.

All the while, I filed a bunch of fun stories about our contestant to cover my rear. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions where I could be professional for about two hours each afternoon and still get away with being excessive fun for the remainder of the sleepless days and nights spent enriching hardworking bartenders and wait staff at various posh establishments.

As good as the stories were, nothing endeared me to the Banner staff more than word about my stupendous party expenditures.

The color drained from my editor’s face when I handed him the total.

“It’s breathtaking,” he said.

It was the first time anything I’d ever done had been compared with the Grand Canyon.

Oh, it’s not that bad, I said.

“It cost less to cover the Super Bowl!”

After that, they wouldn’t let me out of the building to cover a barn fire. It looked like my spelling bee run would end at one.

Then three weeks before the next year’s bee, the girl who’d been designated to go abruptly quit.

I sat down at my computer and instantly composed what was the best thing I’ve ever written in my life. It may have been the best thing anyone’s ever written.

Because I convinced them to risk the company solvency to let me go again. I didn’t do it because I enjoyed living the high life on the company teat. I didn’t do it because I was hankering lobster at Harvey’s or prime rib at The Palm.

I did it because Pierre’d sent me a Christmas card saying his son was going to need braces.

We’re numb to stories of idealists who leave heartland homes and go to Washington and become jaded cogs in the corrupt system.

I’m a guy who can always say he went to Washington and made a real difference.

All the conservative Rons

Two of the most persistent surprises to me about my blogging is the high percentage of Rons and political conservatives who admit to reading it.

I know six Rons who read www.EightDaysToAmish.com and other sites where I simultaneously post.

That’s seems like a lot to me.

I’ve never applied the widgets that’ll inform how many actual readers I have, but if I extrapolate based solely on the Rons then I believe the numbers must be substantial.

Why all the Rons?

Had I been blogging in the 1950s, the number of Rons would have been more understandable. That was when the name was 12th most popular among parents naming baby boys.

But now the name has dropped all the way to 249 on www.babynames.com behind even clunky male handles like Micah, no. 56, or the oddly equine sounding Colton, finishing way out of the money at no. 85.

Even more mystifying is the acknowledged number of conservative readers.

Fifty percent of the Rons are conservative. Plus, there’s Marty, Doug, Kyle, Susan, Max Power, Joyce, musicsmith, Betsy, Chuck and -- who knows? -- perhaps even Ann Coulter and Dick Cheney.

This is surprising because I’m not conservative, disdain conservative ideas and devote nearly one out of every seven posts to bashing conservatives for being stingy, humorless and stupid.

I try to be the opposite of all those things. I strive in all matters to bestow enlightenment, levity and a really swank gratuity with every check.

So why conservatives read this stuff is an enduring mystery to me.

Well, one of the Rons gave me some insight the other day.

We were golfing and engaged in a running argument about Ben Roethlisberger. The topic is upending traditional liberal/conservative law and order thinking.

Liberals like me tend to believe in redemptive third, fourth and fifth chances for miscreants, while conservatives are on record as supporting punitive three-strikes-and-you’re-out laws for petty crooks like shoplifters who steal canned tuna to keep from starving to death.

Of course, most petty crooks aren’t white multi-millionaires who helped the home team win two Super Bowls. So the Roethlisberger case instigates lively discussion.

Liberals like me believe there’s enough embarrassing evidence to warrant dumping him, while conservatives like Ron believe the Steelers should continue to pay him millions of dollars while ignoring his recreational rapes of underage drunks in squalid bathrooms blocked by beefy bodyguards.

It’s a bedrock philosophical discrepancy.

So neither of us was budging on the argument as it raged from the first tee through the fifth green, both of us failing to convince the other that he’s an idiot.

Then Ron laughed and said he was enjoying the back and forth. “What fun would it be if we all agreed on everything?’’ he asked.

“It would be hell if we all agreed with you,” I said, “but if everyone agreed with me it would a utopia.”

And, truly, that’s what it would be. Music would be better. Flowers would smell sweeter and at night happy families would gather in the streets to sing devotionals. If someone said, “Say, did you see last night’s episode of ‘My Name is Earl?” he or she would never be greeted with blank stares.

This blissful existence is my goal.

I devote two or three hours every other day to writing blog posts designed to get people to agree with everything I say.

I don’t do this for money, for prestige or peer acclaim. I do it because it is my goal to get everyone -- liberals, conservatives, wrongs and Rons -- to have a head-slapping eureka moment where they exclaim: “Gadzooks! He’s right. Conan O’Brien is an annoying spaz! The National Enquirer should win the Pulitzer Prize! And Dick Cheney is truly the logical successor to Simon Cowell on American Idol!

“It would be fun if we had scannable forehead bar codes that revealed things like name, astrological sign, political disposition, cereal preference and current level of sexual arousal. He’s right! You can’t have a party without the Stones and the overuse of exclamation points in casual writing is a pox on the grammatical landscape!!!!”

So, yes, it would be paradise if I could convince everyone that my liberal arguments were correct and everyone agreed it was thus.

The bigger question, I asked Ron, is why a conservative like him would ever bother to read me at all.

“It’s because it’s entertaining!” he said.

Even when I’m trying to make a non-humorous and thoughtful political point?

“Especially when you’re trying to make a non-humorous and thoughtful political point!”

So there you go.

Eight Days To Amish: Helping make Rons and conservatives jolly since 2008.

Expense accounting the national spelling bee

As many Americans watched last week’s National Spelling Bee and wondered how children could correctly spell so many polysyllabic words and why most of those that do look like Mumbai extras from “Slumdog Millionaire,” I had more altruistic thoughts.

I wondered how the hundreds of children whose lives I altered for the better are doing today. I wondered how many of them have gone on to to be doctors, educators or noble philanthropists. I wondered if any of them remember me in their prayers.

You see the annual National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C., has for more than 20 years been a hallmark event in my life. It’s an annual commemoration of two weeks in consecutive years when I did more good on behalf of my fellow man than the sum entirety my misspent life.

It was my first experience with an expense account and I learned something illuminating about myself.

I’m a hell of a lot of fun with someone else’s money.

I was a rookie reporter at the now-defunct Nashville Banner, and there’s a perhaps coincidental pattern of places that can be described as now-defunct that once entrusted me with the company loot.

I vividly remember the top editor approaching me while I feigned industriousness by carrying on a pretend phone interview into a dead receiver. I said a polite goodbye to the imaginary subject, set the phone down and looked up. Yes, boss?

“The guy who’s covered the National Spelling Bee for the past 10 years is sick of it. We want you to fly to Washington, chaperone our entrant and write stories about the bee,” he said.

The Banner building had no windows. One editor described days there as similar to being on board a submarine during a long voyage beneath the Arctic circle. I was always thrilled to get outside and enjoy the sweet Tennessee sunshine. That’s why I was so crushed by the boss’s offer.

I’m sorry, I said, but I just can’t afford to fly to Washington and stay in a hotel myself, let alone pay for some poindexter spelling champ.

“Idiot,” he said, “the paper pays for everything. You’ll have an expense account.”

It was a watershed moment in my life. As I’ve truthfully said many times, my idea of a splurge at the time was pizza with pepperoni and sausage. To think that I was going to be let loose in a glamorous city with ample bags of someone else’s money was like some kindly bandit had cut me in on the spree following the bank holdup, an analogy you’ll see is rather apt.

I remember checking into the Capital Hilton and finding a fully stocked bar brimming with dozens of top shelf little bottles of hootch.

Eureka! I thought. I shoveled them all into my suitcase, figuring housekeeping would assume I was a thirsty guy and would re-stock the next morning and we’d begin repeating the procedure for the next five days. And that’s exactly what happened. I didn’t know that each tiny bottle carried a $3 to $5 fee.

With a crisp$20 and bright smile, I became best friends with Pierre the hotel concierge. Over the course of the week, I had a dozen or so conversations with Pierre and every one of them included some form of the line, “Say, Pierre, where can I find the best (lobster, steak, cigars) in town.”

My father was vicariously thrilled with my experience. He called to advise me to attend the Kennedy Center premier of The Caine Mutiny Court Marshall starring Charleton Heston Henry Fonda. Pierre expertly secured me one of the scarce tickets. And this was cool -- President Reagan and wife Nancy were there, too!

My balcony seat was directly above Reagan’s box. I’ll never forget the moment he entered. More than four thousand people rose, turned toward me and began wildly applauding. From my perspective, it looked like they were looking right at me.

I felt so overcome with warmth, I couldn’t help myself. I waved and took a little bow.

Really, after four days on the expense account, word could have gotten around and they may have been applauding for me and not Reagan. As a representative of the Banner, I felt it would have reflected poorly on the institution if I was a cheap tipper, even if the pious old prick who owned the place was a notorious cheapskate.

All the while, I filed a bunch of fun stories about our contestant to cover my rear. It was one of those rare and wonderful occasions where I could be professional for about two hours each afternoon and still get away with being excessive fun for the remainder of the sleepless days and nights spent enriching hardworking bartenders and wait staff at various posh establishments.

As good as the stories were, nothing endeared me to the Banner staff more than word about my stupendous party expenditures.

The color drained from my editor’s face when I handed him the total.

“It’s breathtaking,” he said.

It was the first time anything I’d ever done had been compared with words used to describe to the Grand Canyon.

Oh, it’s not that bad, I said.

“It cost less to cover the Super Bowl!”

After that, they wouldn’t let me out of the building to cover a barn fire. It looked like my spelling bee run would end at one.

Then three weeks before the next year’s bee, the girl who’d been designated to go abruptly quit.

I sat down at my computer and instantly composed what was the best thing I’ve ever written in my life. It may have been the best thing anyone’s ever written.

Because I convinced them to risk the company solvency to let me go again. I didn’t do it because I enjoyed living the high life on the company teat. I didn’t do it because I was hankering lobster at Harvey’s or prime rib at The Palm.

I did it because Pierre’d sent me a Christmas card saying his son was going to need braces.

We’re numb to stories of idealists who leave heartland homes and go to Washington and become jaded cogs in the corrupt system.

I’m a guy who can always say he went to Washington and made a real difference.