A blatantly ad hominem rant

From a Fox news article, "DePauw University Severs Ties With Troubled Delta Zeta Sorority."

"DePauw University's president ordered the Delta Zeta sorority Monday to leave its campus by September in response to a mass eviction of members that sparked allegations that only attractive, popular students were asked to remain." [emphasis mine]

Ah hah.

The article said that DZ " ... long had a reputation of being academically oriented rather than having conventional beauty or partying." The article also said they were referred to on campus as "the dog house."

Warning: Cranky diatribe ahead.

If you want to be "Greek" you have to pretend you have an IQ of 20, drink a lot, sleep around and act like you're better than everyone else. Unless you went to my alma mater (a Baptist college), in which case you can get away with more smarts and you hide your drinking and carousing, but the better-than-everyone-else-part still applies.

I'm cranky today, can you tell?

For those of you out there who are/were Greek and are perfectly fine human beings, my deepest apologies. I know you exist and you don't deserve to be smeared. Understand, I was disinclined toward being Greek before I even got to college by my mother. She quit Phi Mu (at the same Baptist college) because they shunned a perfectly precious and sweet girl because she had scars from polio. Later, not one of her sorority "sisters" showed up for her bridal tea.

Once I got on campus myself, I had only more and more reasons not to pay good money to have a bunch of country club princesses tell me if I was good enough to hang out with them and tell me who my friends could be. I bristled at how the "social Greeks" insulted the guys of Alpha Phi Omega, the "service" fraternity. The Greeks said the A Phi O's were "not good enough" for the social Greeks. I say they were too cool for school.

And in my 15 years since I graduated, I've met a few people who never let go of their inner Greek and continue to be bratty to anyone who is more than one standard deviation away from Mountain Brook. (If you are from Birmingham, you know of which I speak. Again, my deepest apologies to the decent Brookies.)

Okay, rant over.

Marcotte stays on with Edwards; Satan flummoxed

No doubt you’ve heard about the saga of liberal blogger Amanda Marcotte being hired by candidate John Edwards to manage his campaign blog.

Amanda Marcotte’s writing style varies in tone from the incendiary to the downright Hiroshimian. She has an elegant style and vocabulary no doubt inspired by sundry hip hop artists, comment threads on pornographic forums, and Bradley Dingledorf, the pimply, smelly guy who scrawled graffiti on her seventh-grade locker.

Behold this gem of literary fortitude:

“Q: What if Mary had taken Plan B after the Lord filled her with his hot, white, sticky Holy Spirit?

A: You’d have to justify your misogyny with another ancient mythology.”

Convinced that Marcott’s treatise on The Third Person of the Trinity as Human Spermatozoa was merely misunderstood, nuanced satire rather than adolescent brain spew, Edwards said this, defending his decision to retain Marcotte:

“I've talked to Amanda and Melissa; they have both assured me that it was never their intention to malign anyone's faith, and I take them at their word.”

Indeed, rumor has it that the Maligning Bar has been set so high, Satan himself is having a hard time clearing it.

UPDATE: Just for the record, I could care less if John Edwards keeps Marcotte on or not. The fact that her reputation is blighted by vulgarity on a cosmic scale is his misfortune and none of my own. As vile as I think her comments are, I'd rather her come right out and say "f*** you!" than insult my intelligence by feigning innocence about her intentions. Plus, I wouldn't vote for Edwards anyway, but I'd rather the electorate see whose company he's keeping.