I think the reason that the letter writers are so split is that we don't have enough information. It might be that nothing irrevocable has happened yet, that the husband just needs a good head derectumization ("getting his head out of his ass") - or it might be that things are permanently broken.

*The only person who can make this work out is the husband.* LW cannot possibly do this on her own.

If he isn't in too deep, reading these letters are going to be a splash of water in his face; if he is in too deep, then he's going to freak out and get dangerous.

So find someplace safe where he has no idea where you are, or is too far away to get to in an evening. Print out Cary's column, his response, and the letters... put it in an envelope and leave it somewhere where *only he will find it*... not the girl... and then split to your safe place.

His response will dictate your next move. If he responds well, you can plan a strategy *as a team* - if he responds badly, a separation will almost certainly be necessary.

But make sure you're totally out of his reach before that. I unfortunately do agree with many of the writers that something awful might be going on, and awful things unfortunately tend to escalate. :-(

I thought about this some more and this has the potential of being awful.

In specific, I put myself in the position of the husband. He has to understand what this looks like - anyone would. So why isn't he making any effort to demonstrate his innocence?

The best answer is that he's already too far gone for that.

Leave immediately, go somewhere that you can't be traced, and then send him a link to this column in email - and refuse to communicate and particularly to meet him until he's told everything to a therapist and got that therapist's advice (and don't take his word - have him have the therapist call you).

I feel deeply for the poor child who is definitely the perpetual victim but this is a clusterfuck and you should get as far away as you can. A drowning man will bring anyone else down with him.

Pretty well typical for these days. I see the letters column at WaPo are about 4:1 against the article....

I'm cutting out the personal insults from the comments I'm quoting...

@hawkpsd:

"Clinton did nothing of any import his last 4 months. And so on. Don't you remember ?"

Perhaps you don't notice the huge difference here - which is that today the economy is collapsing and everbody's panicking.

@billh:

"And if Bush was currently being very visible and implementing even more drastic measures to help the economy, does anyone actually believe that Madden wouldn't be writing an article exactly opposite of this one lambasting Bush for NOT being a lame duck?"

Bill. Read what you are writing. You're willing to insult a perfect stranger for the article they MIGHT have written in a different world with a more competent President.

When it comes down to it, both of you are implying that the President is right to do nothing and to be absent from the American people in their hour of need. Is this what you actually mean.

Do you remember that Bush vanished for six hours after the 9/11 attacks and it was left to the odious Giuliani to address a terrified nation? Do you remember how Bush also failed to act in the *five days* before Katrina when all the news media were screaming about the risk?

He's never been willing to act before, why should he start now?!

"You miss my point. My point isn't that Bush is or is not a competent President. My point is that to some people like Madden, it doesn't matter what Bush does or doesn't do he is just automatically wrong."

What, exactly, are those right things that Mr. Bush did that Madden found to be wrong?

It's actually fairly hard to come up with one substantial accomplishment of Mr. Bush's presidency. I've put this question to Republicans at times and their answers are invariably political things like "Appointing conservative judges to the Supreme Court".

You're grasping at straws here, anyway. This article is about Bush's final failure, paralyzed like a deer in the headlights while the country's economy collapses. Quibbling about other unidentified articles this writer could conceivably have written is no rebuttal whatsoever.

"Natural born coverup

What gets me is that no one except Berg and some of the others are saying anything about it. Why is the media not touching it with a ten foot pole?"

Could it be that they know the whole thing's ridiculous and don't want to seem like idiots? Occam's Razor and all that?

I've read a lot of the "evidence" that has been presented on this topic - it's madness.

Most of it seems to rest on proving the scanned document we've seen is a fake because the mechanically printed lines in it don't line up to the pixel. Considering the birth certificate was printed almost 50 years ago with a mechanical typewriter and then scanned, I'm surprised the lines even line up to within a couple of pixels. Neither my birth certificate nor others I have seen have text that's completely straight.

If you have any actual evidence, please present it, otherwise stop.

The largest single thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint is to stop eating meat.

Between the SUV and the pounds of expensive beef, it's hard to imagine someone who's a worse example to others.