THE VULTURE WORE SILK

The Anna Nicole body-custody trail deserved to be shown live on daytime cable news. It was fascinating television. It’s domination of evening programming is a little harder to justify, what with the Iraq disaster and the run up to nuclear war with Iran.

The judge’s manner received much criticism but I personally have no standard of comparison. The only court action I’ve seen is with only two parties involved in the case. In the just concluded hearing there were multiple parties with multiple lawyers. How the heck do you control them. It’s like a low paid manager trying to control a team full of high paid ballplayers.

Each lawyer is a prima dona and wants to steal the show. Judge Larry Seidlin, showed them, by his weirdness and unpredictability, that HE was the prima dona, HE was the one viewers would remember.

How frustrating for those high priced lawyers. Judge Seidlin demonstrated his dominance by talking about himself. Let’s say one of the lawyers does extensive research overnight on a point of law and tries to present it the next morning. Judge Seidlin cuts the lawyer off in mid-sentence and says the court doesn’t have time for that. Then the judge spends the next fifteen minutes talking about his career as a tennis instructor.

And he demonstrated, by over-sharing his own humanness with us, that all the messy human exigencies of all the contesting parties would be taken into account.

Judge Seidlin turned what could have been a mosh of carrion critters into a family gathering. We’ll see if his efforts have any positive effect.

Speaking of carrion critters, the Catholic Church is already picking at Anna Nicole’s corpse. Some bishop-prick named Morlino, operating out of Madison, is saying that Anna Nicole’s tragic life and death demonstrate the need to strengthen our marriage laws.

Basically what he’s saying is stronger laws would have kept Anna Nicole from being such a slut, and being a slut is what done her in.

Pud says that the bishop isn’t sincere. “He’s just following the Vatican directive that American clergy should try harder to associate themselves publicly with heterosexuality.

“The bishop wants us to think that he, too, noticed the size of her boobs, nudge nudge.”

So the shameless Catholic Church is using Anna Nicole to attack gay marriage, and any other form of sexual interaction that doesn’t jibe with Catholic teachings.

I wrote the following email to Whispers in the Loggia, which quoted Bishop Robert Morlino extensively.

Anna Nicole’s problems came from lack of love, not from lack of strong marriage laws. Her life was tragic because people exploited her for their own ends--just as you do in your 2/23/07 post.

Despicable. Shame on you.

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