Olio

• Now that it's possible, how 'bout we end the smirky, smarmy '41' and '43' business, and clear up any further confusion over whether President Bush means George Herbert Weepy or George Doofus, Jr., by never referring to either of them ever again?

• Or at least not as "President". "The Defendant" would be acceptable.

• Mr. Real President, who, now that you are safely ensconced in the office I would like to begin referring to as "Barack Hussein Obama" at every opportunity--it's not quite so funny now that he's really the President, eh, wingnuttosphere?--just who was it decided to punt on the speech, and why? Afraid of trying to live up to your reputation? I'm agnostic about it, myself--and some other things we'll get to in a moment--but it felt like turning up for some big-name rock star who plays nothing but his new material, straight through, no encore.

• Going short was good--you wanna draw parallels to Lincoln that's a good place to start--but how do you go short and still have filler? Valley Forge? Whoever put that there should be named US Trade Representative to the Northern Mariana Islands, starting tomorrow.

• Same, and long overdue, for this Westward Ho the Wagons shit. This country was settled by slaughtering the indigenous peoples and destroying their way of life. We can argue about smallpox, if you really want to; we can note that those peoples were, in their turn, frequently as ruthless and bloodthirsty as the rest of our damnable species. But the general pattern is clear: Europeans, especially the English and Spanish, and less so the French, took the land for their own use, through numerical and technical superiority and certain biological advantages (disease, horses), slaughtering and enslaving thousands; and the United States of America warred on any tribe with the impudence not to git when we said Git, then broke the resultant treaties as soon as it was desirable.

I'm not saying I was hoping you'd announce you'd be reviewing every treaty back to 1778, in your office, starting noon Friday. Anybody who'd run on such a platform--or, hell, was discovered to have expressed the idea in an undergraduate paper, for that matter--is not going to be elected President. But lemme tell you a little story.

My wife has been watching a particular soap opera since her college days. She used to have to catch up on vacations; now we get Soap Net. And I've been known to sit in, just to spoil her fun.

And here's the thing: there will be the most ridiculous story lines designed to get someone from A to B; currently, as one example, one of the wealthiest women in the world has suffered transient global amnesia, been declared dead and buried (it was actually her doppelgänger, a waitress from the wrong side of the tracks. I'm not sure how many doppelgängers this makes over the last twenty years). But wait, that's not the ridiculous part. She's arrested for trespassing on her own property--the cops in town don't recognize one of their most illustrious citizens, of course, but that's not the ridiculous part, and thrown in the clink for what seems to be several days without a court appearance. And my question, my usual question, is this: given that you'd settled on this absurd chain of events, and given even that you imagine the conventions of the genre give you a free hand with Coincidence, Probability, and advances in DNA testing, how hard could it be to write it so that it doesn't insult the intelligence at every fucking turn? If we need this "toiling, straining, carving out a better life for their descendants" routine, does it have to be at the expense of our knowledge of the enormity that came before?

• Going topical, well, your call, and who knows? I'm all for slagging the greedy, of course, and the line about "favoring only the prosperous" was when you were in your best rhythm. (Speaking of which, can we do something about that lack of modulation, or is it simply too late and you too famous to bear correction? You're good one on one; you certainly are capable of taking flight; but every speech sounds like you practiced it with a bullhorn. Vast stretches of the transcript ought to be typed in ALL CAPS. Silence. Spaces. Mezzo-fucking-piano, dude.) I just think your audience wanted to soar.

• And thanks for sneaking me in at the back there, sir, but in a day given to interminable expectant exhortations of the Almighty, who, so far as we know, remains steadfastly on the side of the bigger battalions, may I just note that I'm not a Non-Believer? I am, under the circumstances, a Dis-Believer. It's not that I chose not to participate; I think you're all full of shit. If we could at least get that much settled I'll go back to being more patient about my second-class citizenship than y'all have a right to expect. 

• Why was John "Box Turtle" Cornyn seated so prominently? What's it going to take before The Comically Oversized Stetson is recognized as the path-crossing black cat of Presidential inaugurations?

• Dick Cheney. I believe we now know why he's really been hidden for seven years: because he's a fucking drama queen with a gun. If I didn't know better I'd swear he did it just for the satisfaction of taking someone else's handicapped space. I am also now convinced that it's really Lynn who's been running the VP's office all this time.

• "...not Andy Card, Dan Bartlett, nor Dan Senor will miss any meals"
-Jimbo Riley, January 18, 2009

So thanks, CBS, for making all our dreams come true, not just by hiring Bartlett, but having him on hand so that Katie's platitudes wouldn't just hang in the air unseconded. Oooh, Dan Bartlett is wishing the new President well!  Gee, I guess the extremist Right really is reasonable! I watched the speech on C-SPAN, but I turned over to CBS for a slog just after, in time to hear Katie ask Dan "What's the overwhelming feeling right now for President Bush?" which was not answered with "Drunk, probably" or "God, Katie, do you still not realize the man's dumb as a stump and a complete sociopath?" but, instead, more platitudes. Let the Weasel Soar, indeed. At one point Bartlett said he didn't think Bush would "try to interject himself into the public debate". Thank you, Amazing Kreskin. After Katie volunteered the African legacy bullshit, Bartlett said something about how Bush had "given voice to people living under authoritarian regimes". I know, I know, I'm a little older than Dan, but I distinctly remember Jeanne Kirkpatrick saying we liked authoritarians. Tempus fucking fugit, I guess.

• There was someone on hand--he couldn't get a word in edgewise, so I'm not sure who it was--who finally managed to note above the Bush panegyric that a lot of people were just thrilled to see him go. Which caused Katie to suddenly go all epistemological on us, and Dan to add that this was true of every President. Sure, Dan. Just never as true. Thanks for your help.

• Even better, though, was a taped exit deal when some CBS news supernumerary or other told the story of "one of the most touching moments in recent inaugural history", which gave me about 0.5 sec to think "it's gonna be Reagan". And sure enough, it was the tale of that bittersweet moment when the Just Ex-President and Unindicted Co-Criminal, flying over the White House on his way to personal oblivion and public aircraft carrier christenings, said--as the CBS flunkey had it--"Look, honey, it's our little bungalow." Awwwwww. And everybody broke down, included hardened Secret Service men, he says.

Oh, yeah. My Poor Wife reports students openly weeping in the hallways after hearing that one in class.

Look, maybe if you've still got the man's dessicated member in your mouth the Lou Cannonization of Reagan is touching, and never mind that it's entirely possible by that point he thought it was a bungalow.  Or a painting. Or the in-flight movie. But as far as I'm concerned it's a first-class example of how Wit and Wisdom were devalued in those days, and with predictable long-term results. Plus, he called his wife "Mommy," not "honey". Funny how that little detail got garbled.

In Other News: Mata Hara Wasn't A Spy, The Titanic Hit An Iceberg, And The Pope Professes Roman Catholicism

[In case that's not legible, "After she was graduated from Smith College she joined the OSS..." begins the second sentence of her flyleaf bio in my hand-me-down Book Club 1968 edition.  If we'd been as eager to publicize what she really thought of Emeril Lagasse ("my garage attendant really enjoys his show") we'd be much better off as a nation.]

Another Astonishing Success Story For The FBI, Eh, Ms Viera?

AP: Anthrax Scientist Commits Suicide

WE'RE loath to do anything that might tarnish this blog's reputation for cool, dispassionate analysis of Today's Issues, but th' fuck if this case hasn't stunk from the start; th' fuck if the administration, The Washington Post, and the Judith Miller-owned New York Times weren't flogging the It's Entirely Possible That Saddam Hussein Did It! routine long after they or anyone else who'd paid attention worthy of the term "scant" could have believed it; and Bruce E. Ivins, lately deceased, was apparently running around the very "defense" labs we had more or less determined were the source of the stuff, able to operate his own unauthorized part-time evidence cleaning service as a sideline.

Don't get me wrong; the fact that Ivins was a suspect, the fact that he's said to have known that criminal charges were about to be filed against him, and the fact that he topped himself, supposedly as a result, do not make him guilty. They do not close the case. And they sure don't answer any gnawing questions about the investigation. By the same token, the fact that once again the Feds can't solve the highest of high-profile cases without stepping on their collective dick (Richard Jewell, anyone?), and they can't seem to suss the motive of murderous right-wing cranks (Eric Rudolph, anyone?), doesn't mean the case would have been solved easily otherwise, or that it was purposely sidetracked.

But then leave us recall that at the time the event was played as an extension of 9/11 by other means. And while 9/11 provided the cover for ill-conceived and criminally executed invasions, still ongoing, plus the recently-butressed repeal of the Fourth Amendment by voice vote and cloakroom deal, our yapping news spaniels just sorta lost interest in the case right around the time it became a dead-solid lock that the source of the anthrax was domestic (and, more than this, domestic government labs which we had insisted to that point did not exist anymore).

There were a finite number of reasonable suspects. They were people with security clearances, meaning they were subject to reexamination or removal. It's one thing to elude detection for longer than we might hope for in such circumstances; it's another to have been hoovering (sorry) up evidence right under the investigation's snout, especially in a case which, at least for public consumption, was part of the New Everlasting War On Terra.

Again, we no more trust news accounts than we do wingnut-tinged demonstrations of middle-aged estrus over the Fed's incredible accomplishments, and we'd never presume to question the inner workings of an investigation even if we did. But there's a minor throbbing in both temples this morning, one which seems to be suggesting that "murderous, terror-dealing unbalanced right-wing extremist sociopath with a security clearance" perhaps does not narrow down the master list quite as much as we'd like.

When This Sort Of Impulse Strikes, Sit Down And Try To Remain Calm Until It Passes.

Elaine Sciolino, "A Guide to the French. Handle With Care." Times, March 23

SOMEWHERE  in Nabokov--I can't find the quote online, so I suspect it's not in his fiction but something he relayed somewhere about the strange country he lived in for a time, the one called "America"--is the travel writer who says "The fjords are too famous to mention, and all Norwegians love flowers." It's one of two fjord-based lines with currency Chez Riley, the other coming from Bart and Lisa's disappointment with the predictability of Knightboat ("The Crime-Solving Boat!") scripts:

Bart: Oh, every week there's a canal.
Lisa: Or an inlet.
Bart: Or a fjord.

Sciolino exits the Times Paris bureau she's chiefed since 2002, and she writes a throwaway about how to stereotype Parisians in order to seem more like a stereotypical American. A harmless enough bon-bon, even if it was made out of melted Hershey bars. The only reason I stopped was the quickening dread of sensing Maureen Dowd just pages away.

But then we started off badly, Ms Sciolino and I, not to mention it was the weekend and they'd just refilled my Vicodin prescription:

“Every man has two countries, his own and France,” says a character in a play by the 19th- century poet and playwright Henri de Bornier.

Is it just me, or the Vicodin, or has this construction suddenly taken off like home makeovers? I swear to god I recently saw "The novelist Leo Tolstoy once said...." As opposed to Leo Tolstoy, the upholsterer? Would "wrote Henri de Bornier" have left millions of Times readers stranded before they got past the drop cap? Would the Ombudsman's inbox be flooded with, "Henri de Bornier did not say that. A character in a play he wrote said it. Oh, and he was also a poet. Cancel my subsription." ?

Okay, okay, so maybe it would have left an unconscionable amount of white space.  Still, I would have been in a sunnier mood when I reached:

1: Look in the Rear-View Mirror
To begin to understand France, you have to look back. The French are obsessed with history. Part of this feeling is a genuine affinity for the past, part a desire to cling to lost glory, part an insecurity that comes with a tepid economy and the struggle to integrate a growing Arab and African population.
Marie-Antoinette regularly makes the covers of magazines. So does Napoleon Bonaparte.
No anniversary is too minor to celebrate. In my time here, France has marked the 20th anniversary of France’s sinking of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior, the 200th anniversary of the high school baccalaureate diploma, the 60th anniversary of the bikini and the 100th anniversary of the brassiere.
For the 100th anniversary of her birth in January, Simone de Beauvoir was celebrated with half a dozen biographies, a DVD series, a three-day scholarly symposium and a cover of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur with a nude photo of her from the back.

Welcome Home, Ms Sciolino! You'll have plenty of time to unpack before joining your fellow Americans drinking themselves into a stupor for Cinco de Mayo.

But then it got ugly.

2: An Interview Is Sometimes Not an Interview
Their love of history doesn’t mean the French always render it accurately. It has long been common practice for journalists in France to allow their interview subjects to edit their words. “Read and corrected,” the system is called.
I once took part in an interview with Jacques Chirac, when he was president, in which he said it would not be all that dangerous for Iran to have a nuclear weapon or two. That certainly was not French policy. So the official Élysée Palace transcript left out the line and replaced it with this: “I do not see what type of scenario could justify Iran’s recourse to an atomic bomb.”

Sheesh, your own paper has spent most of the past decade "correcting" the statements of George W. Bush to make him sound like a native speaker of English, let alone one not suffering from alcohol-induced brain bubbles. And before that it was busy proving Al Gore was a serial prevaricator by quoting stuff that might have been a lie if he'd said it. The French system sounds like sanity itself compared with that. In fact it sounds close to ideal, avoiding mass hysteria over stupid off-the-cuff gaffes, provided we know what's going on.

And considering the eagerness with which your paper and others granted anonymity to the real, proven liars of the Bush administration, one is forced to conclude that what is missing from the French system in your estimation is the right of journalists to decide who gets gunned down. The continual expressions of working journalists of faith in their field is truly remarkable, especially when you consider you can't find an ounce of it in anyone outside the field.

6: Don’t Wear Jogging Clothes to Buy a Pound of Butter
Rules govern even the smallest activities. I was making chocolate chip cookies one Saturday afternoon and ran out of butter. Dusted with flour, still in my morning jogging clothes, I dashed out to the convenience store up the street. The problem was that it is not just any street. It’s the Rue du Bac, one of the most chic places to see and be seen on Saturdays. I heard my name called and turned to face a senior Foreign Ministry official, dressed in pressed jeans and a soft-as-butter leather jacket, wearing an amused look, and carrying a small Nespresso shopping bag.
We went to a corner cafe for a drink. The Swedish ambassador and his wife stopped as they were riding by on their bikes. Both were in tailored tweed blazers, slim pants and loafers. Then Robert M. Kimmitt, the deputy treasury secretary, walked by.
He and my foreign ministry friend joked that my style didn’t match the setting. I made the point that it was my neighborhood and I could dress however I wanted. But as my French women friends told me afterward, jogging clothes (shoes included) are to be removed as soon as one’s exercise is over.

I like to think it's the casual slobbiness of Americans (moi aussi) which is at fault here, although I'm not exactly certain this holds in all those American versions of the Rue du Bac, either. I get eyeballed at Keystone at the Crossing, fer chrissakes, although the more astute among the haute monde note the $600 sunglasses and $200 rock-climbing shoes and visibly relax, having pegged me as a harmless eccentric. Still, if only Sciolino had skimped on the introduction she could have managed to work in one or two more ambassadors, a mid-level British peer, and the ghosts of F. Scott and Zelda.

7: Feeling Sexy Is a State of Mind, or: Buy Good Lingerie
In her close-fitting sweaters and pants and tailored leather jackets, Eliane Victor is both stylish and alluring. The retired author and journalist is in her late 80s.
For French women, being sexy has nothing to do with age and everything to do with attitude. Arielle Dombasle, the actress and cabaret singer married to the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, dared to expose her breasts on the cover of Paris Match and took off her clothes in a song-and-dance revue at Crazy Horse in Paris. Some people feel she tries too hard. But give the lady some credit. She’s turning 50 and has a Barbie-doll body.
A 600-page sociological study of sexuality in France released this month concluded that 9 out of 10 women over 50 are sexually active. The sexiest French women seem naturally skilled in the art of moving, smiling and flirting.

Elaine F. Scolino, born Buffalo, New York, circa 1949, per Wikipedia.

He Paid Up, Right? And She's Not Dead? Okay, So What's The Problem?

I KNOW I speak for most Americans this morning when I convey my profound shock upon learning, yesterday, that there's only one "L" in "Eliot Spitzer".

This sort of thing, however, can't possibly surprise anyone: Christopher Beam in Slate's We-Put-The-'Conventional'-In-Conventional Wisdom snoozefest, the "Trailhead":

One problem, though: Addressing the Spitzer flap raises the ghosts of scandals past, namely Monica Lewinsky. Clinton has so far managed during this campaign to avoid public mention of her husband’s diddling. If the Spitzer controversy drags out, it could become a painful reminder of the final White House years. (Of course, you could argue that it would make people sympathize with her all over again.)

Once again, the mind would reel, if the mind hadn't long since shut down and begun consuming its own proteins.

Okay, fine, it's news. If you live in New York it's even real news. If you're a Republican, and you've been a consistent voice against corruption, public misconduct and private miscreancy, and if you've never uttered the phrase "limousine liberal", "class warfare", or remarked on the size of John Edwards' home or the price of his haircuts, have at it. In other words, if you're a Republican, shut up. You ceded Sex to the Democratic party long ago in exchange for the right to stuff yourselves at the public trough. If Spitzer had been caught manipulating the futures market you'd have something. If he'd dedicated his gubernatorial campaign to eliminating prostitution, or to bringing down high prices, you'd have something. As it is, he's a horndog who got caught.

All three nets ran the story first last night (I didn't actually check; my Poor Wife was at the controls, so three channels in ten seconds was something approaching slow motion), and we settled on ABC, which executed a toss about three minutes in (after the entire story had been laid out, and after they'd aired Spitzer's comments) apparently in order to show a picture that included Spitzer and Hillary Clinton. The were part of a line. They might have been marching for Breast Cancer Awareness or taking part in an amateur production of A Chorus Line for all I know. Or for all ABC cared. It was obvious they were in their element.

Still, it's an ill wind that blows any politician no good and doesn't provide me with a least a bitter chuckle, so here's mine. The wine store down the street from me used to be owned by a husband and wife team. They were each third-or-fourth generation money and acted like it, and they'd bought the place--formerly a neighborhood package store--in late middle age because they thought it would be "fun". They began turning it into a wine specialty shop on the grounds that this would keep the riff-raff out. They were, indeed, the sort of people who used "riff-raff" without irony, and who referred to their intended client base as "The Quality".

This was the late 70s, and the beginning of my wine collecting phase, so I frequented the place, because the nascent wine boom was not due to hit Indianapolis for another eight years and it was one of the few local spots where "Wine Section" didn't mean "Where do you keep the Gallo jugs?" The wife was the Expert, while the husband watched the books, and it was obvious even in my fairly green connoisseurship that she didn't know what th' fuck she was talking about and had turned a pastime of bullshitting about stuff she didn't know with other clueless snobs into a second career. So I took to coming in at times when she wouldn't be there, and I got to know the staff pretty well, and they loved to relay tales of their evil inbred masters.

Now, the husband--you might want to sit down--was a rock-ribbed Republican, goddamned-Democrats-steal-my-money type who once made a major production out of removing the appliance bulb from the EXIT sign when he learned he wasn't covered by regulations requiring it be lit. And one day the major story in the Indianapolis Racist Star concerns a local grocery magnate who's been caught by the feds skimming proceeds from his pop machines. And he was caught because he'd opened two accounts for his gilt and he put more than $10,000 in each.

(Sorry to interrupt the hilarity, but we would like to note that Spitzer didn't run afoul of the law, unless you, like ABC News, believe we're still enforcing the Mann Act; he ran afoul of financial institutions being "encouraged" to report whatever they consider to be attempts to skirt the law. Aaron Nimzowitsch, the great chess Grandmaster, once complained to officials about his opponent's smoking. He came back ten minutes later to complain again. "But he stopped smoking," they said. "Yes," Nimzowitsch replied, "but he looks as if he wants to.")

So the guy at the register is astonished when the Boss starts talking about the deal with one of the Quality who'd stopped by, and seems really critical of it, repeating, "How could he have done it?" over and over.

"I thought, jeez, this is a side of him I'd never seen," the register guy tells me. "Maybe he'd turned over a new leaf or this scared the shit out of him. And then he says, 'He had to know you only put $9000 in a single account.' "

Dear Keith,

I like about 55% of your show. I mean that as high praise. I like you, in a Q-ratings sense. I never can watch the thing when you take the night off, which could be chalked up to that cookie-cutter (make that Cookie-cutter) substitute of yours, but I couldn't ever watch when Brian Unger hosted either. I wouldn't think A. Whitney Brown is all that busy. The guy I'd really watch is Norbizness, who, in any fair world, would at least be the driving force behind your celebrity coverage, although in a fair world we wouldn't need any.

It's not the celebrity coverage, mind you, although that "Another story my producers are making me cover" business is so unfunny I feel guilty for mentioning it, and I'd be glad to help whomever it is Michael Musto has pictures of get them back, gratis. What perturbs me most is the ginned-up Liberal Outrage. It doesn't happen all that often, because, well, because of something called the Bush Administration, reliable producers of real outrages on a regular basis. But some slow news nights you'll be laboring some Cheney soundbite like a starving dog works a bone, and to Dana Milbank or somebody, and I'll curse myself for having taped The Daily Show instead of waiting to watch the 8 o'clock rerun.

And then there's those Special Comments. You won wide acclaim in Left Blogostan for a couple last year, after which they started sprouting like sunflowers under the bird feeder, and all of them delivered in a sort of "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this Wall!" bullshit gravitas. Thankfully that particular surge was short-lived. But you took up your pen again last night in response to the new Iraq funding bill:

This is, in fact, a comment about… betrayal.

Few men or women elected in our history—whether executive or legislative, state or national—have been sent into office with a mandate more obvious, nor instructions more clear:

Get us out of Iraq.

Yet after six months of preparation and execution—half a year gathering the strands of public support; translating into action, the collective will of the nearly 70 percent of Americans who reject this War of Lies, the Democrats have managed only this:
The Democratic leadership has surrendered to a president—if not the worst president, then easily the most selfish, in our history—who happily blackmails his own people, and uses his own military personnel as hostages to his asinine demand, that the Democrats “give the troops their money”;
The Democratic leadership has agreed to finance the deaths of Americans in a war that has only reduced the security of Americans....

I spoke yesterday about your colleague Brian Williams' breezy characterization of "Democratic defeat". I'm not so choleric about presenting it as a national defeat. It is, clearly, or rather it's the continuation of one. But I still stand behind what I said about the Democrats: they probably got everything they were going to from the hand they held. That's not to say they got everything out of it they could have. The 2006 elections, however one wishes to characterize their "historical import", did not put Democrats in control of the government, just the agenda of the House and Senate. Anyone who missed the point should have been clued in last January. The war was not going to be defunded in a flash.

That 70% of the population which is--now--opposed to the war hasn't translated into many Republican votes. Less than one-third public approval sure hasn't put an anti-war candidate at the top of the Republican polls. It's a cryin' shame that the abysmal facts on the ground haven't done the job that politics has not, but if honest deliberation ever becomes the norm in Washington, check for Rod Serling at the beginning of each segment.

I don't consider this a defense of Democrats. I'm only a Democrat by default. Or rather, I'm a McGovern Democrat, the guy they'd try to hide at the back of the Family Reunion photo except I never show up. I gave them a second chance--the Great Leap of Faith, Hunter S. called it--in '76, then watched them take their own President out and shoot him. Since then I've been hiding in remote monasteries, still saying the Mass in Latin. If you want betrayal, and you need someone beyond the Bush gang for some reason, check the 2002 Democrats who got maneuvered into the War Resolution vote weeks before the 2002 elections. Me, I'll take parliamentary competence over rhetorical pandering to my presumed position any day, and hope to see a time when they're put together.

But my real point, Keith, is this: you work in television. Like it or not--you said "not" after cashing checks for a year and a half--you were a cog in the All Clinton's Cock, All the Time bullshit, and your current show was hardly a clearinghouse for anti-war sentiment before the thing went obviously Southwards. You recently told us how you held your tongue about Imus until he was fired. Your lead in is Chris Fucking Matthews, and you were "forced" to fluff Tim Russert's brave testimony at the Libby trial without ever mentioning his previous complicity. Your show's stable of experts includes Dana Milbank, formerly TNR's Al Gore hitman, currently WaPo reporter where he's been co-responsible for such Great Moments in Journalism as the retyping of the anonymous White House Vandalism story and the Post's jaw-dropping tick-tock on Bush's "deep personal involvement" in the China spy-plane crisis. Then there's über-Clinton cocksniffer and volunteer Gore makeup consultant Howard Fineman. That's four betrayers of the public trust whose jobs don't depend on getting 534 megalomaniacs to agree with them. Do any of you, or your professions writ large, bear any responsibility for us being in this hole we now must try to dig ourselves out of? Are you planning on speaking out about it just as soon as MSNBC fires Matthews for the crap that comes out of his mouth, or when the deal with WaPo-Newsweek expires? Would you warn me ahead of time?

The Constitution Is Not A Murder-Suicide Pact

(EOM)