All Hail MUG

This is why I love Charlie Suisman, whoever he is, and his fabulous daily email Manhattan User's Guide:

"My, my, my, everyone's so sensitive these days. You can hardly call someone a macaca in the South any more without people of color taking offense or broadcast a mini-series that rewrites history for partisan purposes without a whole whoop-de-do deposited in its path.

Something is always setting someone off somewhere, have you noticed? Do you remember the woman whose epilepsy could be triggered by hearing the voice of Entertainment Tonight's Mary Hart? "It would set off abnormal electrical discharges in the brain...Upon hearing Hart's voice, the woman would rub her stomach, hold her head, and 'look confused and far away...and out of it.'" True story – if you can believe the New England Journal of Medicine. (Grist, too, for a Seinfeld episode – Kramer convulses when he hears Hart's voice).

We knew it had to happen sometime. Last week, a woman whose 2-year-old son was missing was subjected to an on-air grilling (via phone) by CNN's Nancy Grace. The next day, she committed suicide. Whether or not the mother had anything to do with the child's disappearance, as Grace insists, we have a sense of how she felt: when we hear Grace's voice on a guilty-as-not-yet-charged, tried or convicted harangue, we look longingly at the nearest plastic bag, or at least bag of spinach.

If the White House has its way, the rules on torture (deemed quaint by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, an apparatchik so loathsome that he almost makes us miss John Ashcroft) may get an upgrade: Geneva Conventions 2.0. It's just the administration's way of saying, hey, it's still the Free Pass Decade, baby. Accountability is for girly-men. When Congress releases the Geneva upgrade, we expect Grace to get grandfathered in, so that waterboarding, snapping dogs, and pressure under Grace will be considered legal coercive methods."