Thursday, June 17

Walking Tall: Happily Ever After

Andrew Ferguson, "Ride Along With Mitch: Can the astonishing popularity of Indiana's penny-pinching governor carry him to the White House in 2012?" Six volumes. June 14
When the oppo researchers and the national press do get around to opening up Daniels’s life for inspection, they will find a few embarrassments. One is his arrest in 1970 for marijuana possession when he was a student at Princeton. He spent two nights in jail and paid a $350 fine, and later wrote about the bust in a column for the Star in 1989.
WHICH of course by now serves his purposes, cost-free: the Faithful love nothing so much as the Sinner Redeemed an' Testifying, and the libertarians--I'm sorry, the even more Faithful--admire the fact that he was caught dealing. Meanwhile, we'd like to point out that within two years he was working for Dick Lugar, which goes on his resumé with pride, further proof that our priorities as a nation are severely screwed up, and have been for forty years minimum.
More painfully, he and his wife Cheri divorced in 1994. She moved to California, leaving Daniels with the four daughters, aged 8 to 14, and married a doctor. She divorced again and moved back to Indiana. She and Mitch remarried in 1997.

Cheri has never spoken about this publicly, and from what I can tell it’s been mentioned in print only twice. Daniels’s only comment was to the Indianapolis Star in 2004: “If you like happy endings, you’ll love our story.”
People who enjoyed The Mitch and Cheri Story may also like: Diana: The People's Princess; Creepy Co-Enablers and the Public That Can't See Through Them; and The Big Book of Combovers.

Or just luxuriate in the tale from 2001: Lovebirds Mitch and Cheri are nesting in Washington, D.C., and Some Gated Community, Hamilton County, Indiana, respectively, when the anthrax bomber strikes. Cheri Daniels calls 911 in a panic, because she's received a bulging envelope in the mail which is leaking white powder faster'n Kelsey Grammar. Turns out, the Boys at the Crime Lab say, to be talcum powder. Despite this being, y'know, the height of Total Fucking Panicky Time in America, and this being the personal dwelling of a Cabinet official, the investigation is pretty much done before the responding officers leave. Mitch does not vow to quit his job and hunt down the perp, by motorcycle, for however long it takes. So if you view Miss Havisham as a role model, you'll love their story, too.

4 comments:

Fearguth said...

Mr. Riley,

I have several reasons for believing the blogosphere should not be abolished. You're reason #1.

Yours,

Fearguth

Scott C. said...

Great, now I'm gonna think of Mitch every time I read The Mouse and the Motorcycle to my nieces.

bjkeefe said...

If you're in need of an emetic, Dave Weigel points and snickers at an interview of your boy Mitch, conducted by Michael Bush-Person.

The fluffery is not to be believed. It even outdoes anything Ana Marie Cox ever wrote about John McCain.

desertscope said...

I am currently reading The Civil War by Shelby Foote. It is interesting that many if not most right wing nuts (including, of course, many of the elected officials of your fine state) speak in the same manner as the politicos of the now defunct Confederacy. Do the people of Indiana not remember on which side of the that conflict their forebears fought?