My theory is that it's just the nature of extremism -- when you get a group of people driven not by a pursuit of good ideas, but rather by a fixed, unchangeable ideology, it eventually runs to the most extreme position.

It's basically a game of keeping up with the Joneses, only with purity. To advance within the group, one must be holier-than-the-rest. And that person risks losing that position to the person even holier than they are. Until finally, the group is run by the most extreme, and the more reasonable are purged. This process accelerates when the rest of society starts moving towards a moderate position, and the extremist group feels like it needs to be more and more pure to defend itself.

But it's also the nature of progress. As the "pure" shrink down to the "really pure," the rest have the freedom to return to the moderate majority. Until one day suddenly you look up and you're the last 50 members of the KKK marching through Forsyth, Georgia, and everyone else has decried racism.

(Or at least that's my theory, dashed off half-assedly.)

I don't know if the husband slept with this friend, and it strikes me as almost unimportant, because the real problem is that he's missing something terribly important in his life, and the letter writer is totally unwilling to provide it.

It's not that he wants this other woman -- he doesn't. It's that he wants his wife to have some of the same qualities as her. Well, that can be a problem -- except that the qualities he wants from his wife are more engagement, more activity, more LIFE in their life together.

She looks at this other woman, looks at what her husband tells her again and again are his needs, and says "oh, I recognize that those are his needs, I recognize why he finds that so important and how much it brings to him when he gets it from her but, well, I wouldn't want to be sleepy. I mean, I couldn't POSSIBLY function on only seven hours."

And he looks at her and thinks "well, I'm bored as hell and don't see any reason to even be interested in her anymore since all she does is sleep and do the housework, but at least she's well-rested." And you're both miserable.

You don't have to go out every night. But you have to be passionate about life, or he can never be passionate about you. So meet him halfway, live life some, and soon enough he'll forget he even knew whatshername.

(And the other woman was cold to the LW because the husband had told her that his wife was a cold, boring shrew who wouldn't ever leave the house. Not trying to be mean -- but I've seen that many times. He was offloading about the LW to the other woman, the other woman took all his complaints literally, and that's why she was so cold.)

nkennedy, I agree entirely about the Bud Light commercial. The woman was wearing fewer clothes because a coat and scarf are a bit warm for the tropical beach that they had magically gone to. The story of the commercial is "Bud Light with nasty artificial lime flavoring transports you from winter to summer." In summer, women (and men) do, in fact, wear less clothing.

But I'll go a step further, since this is supposedly an example of "rape culture." That woman in that ad WANTED to be transported to a warm, summery beach where she could lay out in the sand in a tasteful-and-not-too-revealing-and-kinda-comfortable-looking outfit. She wanted (for reasons I'll never understand) to drink a lime-flavored light beer that reminds you of squeezing a bunch of fruit into Zima to make it taste like...well, to make it taste. As such, the message is that Bud Light-with-chemical-tasting-crap-in-it is something you should drink if you want to be attractive to women.

Attracting women with your questionable drink choices and "rape" are worlds apart -- so I don't see any argument that this has anything to do with "rape culture."

Look, I want to be very clear on what I'm saying. I'm not saying that Obama is a communist groomed by the Soviet Union to turn America into a satellite republic. I'm not saying that.

What I'm saying is that there's this allegation out there -- but the liberal mainstream media refuses even to report on it. I mean, there are eyewitnesses who saw actual communists who knew about Obama well before he was even elected to an Illinois state position -- before he even decided to go into politics. How do you explain that? Why isn't the media looking into that?

Maybe there's an innocent explanation for the fact that Obama studied Marxism at Harvard Law School. And, look, maybe there's a good reason why Obama didn't want to be seen joining the Communist Party at Columbia University, and so officially remained a "non-member" of that group throughout his time there -- even as it plotted the overthrow of the U.S. government. Maybe he can even explain why he spoke at thousands of campaign stops but at not one -- NOT ONE -- did he ever tell the American people about the hammer and sickle tattoo on his left buttock. Maybe he's got some great, handy-dandy explanation for concealing that fact from us until after the election, and if so, I'd like to hear it.

But because the mainstream liberal media is in bed with the Democrats, and would never -- never -- investigate a story like that, we'll never know. That's all I'm saying.

(How was that? Too much? Not enough?)