I dunno, it sort of jumps out at you that an opportunity was missed in not titling this piece "What hath Domenech writ?" Or would that have been heavy-handed?

I hear the "Domenech done" allusion, intentional or not, but the midphrase shift of allusion grinds the earbox.

Just imagine for a moment that one or both of the grandparents were sexual abusers. Would anyone be talking about ways to accommodate their need or their right to see the grandchildren? Or talking about the benefits to the grandchildren of knowing the grandparents? Of course not! These days everybody knows the drill for that scenario: keep the children as far away as possible and take steps to ensure there is no backdoor contact.

But somehow there should be a different answer just because the abusers aren't sexual in nature? Somehow we shouldn't be overly concerned about the abuse because no wee-wees or hoo-hoos are involved? Sorry, I don't see it. These grandparents are unsafe at any speed.

It's natural for someone like LW who never had the loving, healthy parents to whom every child has a birthright, for someone like LW to romanticize the warm, cuddly relationship that children can enjoy (in the best of cases) with grandparents. The fantasy of seeing your own children enjoy a relationship like that with grandparents must resonate deeply in the hungry corners of any loved-starved heart including LW's. It's sort of a last chance to imagine oneself warm and happy in their embrace. But with grandparents like this, a fantasy is all that it can ever be. The parental duty is to keep children away from manipulators and abusers like these. They teach all the wrong life lessons.

And the prosaic truth of the matter is that even if children never once set eyes on a grandparent, they'd never miss it. The relationship with grandparents nearly always ends abruptly, anyway, from death if nothing else. Absent grandparents don't leave a hole in the heart the way absent or abusive parents do.

Having said all that, of course LW needs therapy (and legal advice) to come to terms with her parents, the healthy childhood they stole from her, and the threat they pose to her children. Who wouldn't need such support in her place? Whether she's "broken" is really beside the point. She's obviously "unbroken" enough to be making an eminently healthy attempt to protect her children from the kind of childhood injuries she sustained.

Plenty of people who seek counseling discover that the real brokenness is more around them than inside them. Some of them even know that coming through the door. This notion that counseling is for broken people belongs to a bygone era. Truly broken people seldom seek counseling; it's the people around them who seek it and benefit greatly from it.

In any case, Cary's rambling, melodramatic, and self-absorbed advice to LW remains an enigma. Did she somehow lead him to believe that she and not her parents is the real manipulator, perhaps the real threat? He neither offers nor alludes to any such evidence. Is he himself a grandparent who has a troubled relationship with a son or daughter and identifies too clearly with the grandparents here? It seems too tidy an explanation. So we can only conjecture. All we know for certain is that his reply was long on rumination and short on support and useful advice.

I hope LW will not let Cary's confusion blind her to the whole other level of emotional support and practical assistance that a professional and duly licensed practitioner can offer her. Licensed Professional Counselors, Licensed Clinical Social Workers, Licensed Marriage and Family Therapists, and Licensed Psychologists all have a lot to offer to LW in her situation, regardless of how "broken" she might or might not be. At the same time, she should probably consult a lawyer.

SB wrote: And what the hell is a "whinger"? Could that perhaps mean "whiner", someone such as BodAbroad?

Well, you could have looked it up.

'To whinge' is a legitimate verb found mostly in British and Australian English but also in certain parts of the United States. It's pretty much the same as 'to whine' although as I recall, it has a separate root. While whinging is often spelled without the 'e', here in America we'd be prone to spell it the way we spell singeing in order to disambiguate it.

So yes, it does perhaps mean "whiner", but the condescension boomerangs back on you. It's not the person who used this word who needs some broadening of his English-language skills, it's the Yank who didn't recognize it.

...resoundingly reaffirms the principle that our highest political officials can and must be held accountable when they break the law.

And here I thought it reaffirmed the opposite: that their lackeys and whipping-boys will be held accountable in their stead.

...a warning that no official is invulnerable.

Well, except for ones like Duck! Cheney, Karl Rove, Richard Armitage... So yeah, apart from ones who actually matter, I guess maybe no official is invulnerable.

It's part of Al Qaeda's campaign to cow us into submission by embarrassing our leaders and celebrities, doncha know?

First their psy-ops brigade tried to break the American public's war resolve by hacking the webpage of Dr Laura's son Deryk. It was a brilliant plan, but the Army was too smart for them and exposed the villainous slander for what it was.

So now the Qaedans have learned their lesson: the Dr Laura thing wasn't subtle enough. Now they're moving on to figures like Col. Boylan. We mustn't fall for these insidious forgeries. They could make us doubt the cause.