Two days ago, it was Richard Nixon’s 100th birthday. I know. I know. I’m having a hard time coming down from it myself. Part of the reason you might have had a hard time reaching me was that I was busy planting bugs in Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s office and faking letters suggesting Cory Booker hates French-Canadians, just to keep R.N.’s spirit alive. Anyway, in honor of the Unindicted One’s centennial, I give you Hunter S. Thompson’s brilliant obituary of him.

The marketing ploy wherein a woman writes a book that elevates “femininity” over feminism is probably as old as feminism itself. Alisa Valdes’s The Feminist and the Cowboy is just the latest work of this type, a work that I take it claims that all Ms. Valdes needed to locate and appreciate her femininity was a rough-hewn man o’ the land to dominate her until Simone de Beauvoir melted from her mind. It’s since emerged that this domination is more accurately read as abuse. Valdes claims she’s since left the cowboy, but she says  also that she won’t reevaluate her thinking. So I guess we can expect another memoir in a few years wherein Ms. Valdes will expound on how dating a the next distant, mean-spirited, abusive jerk makes her feel like a woman, and how all those blinkered feminists with their silly drives to control their lives, bodies, and finances are missing out.

Ford Madox Ford was wrong. This is the saddest story ever told.

Later.