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Tag: family

Safe Table Talk for the Holiday Season

Conversing Peacefully with Your Family at Thanksgiving

It’s been quite a year, folks. Hell, it’s been quite a week. In the last few days alone, our exalted leader tweeted a tweeny tantrum about the height and weight of a cranky and well-armed foreign leader. (Dear Diary, Rocketman hurt my feelings today, but I put a nuke in his locker, so we’ll see who’s laughing after fourth period…)

That’s only the very latest jaw-dropping moment, though, in a stunning string of horrors since we last sat down to Thanksgiving with our families. There was the Election That Enlighted Us All About Our Racist, Terrified Neighbors. That was followed by the daily matinees from the White House circus, including incompetent appointments to crucial government posts. There were hurricanes, floods, and fires. Domestic and foreign terrorism. Revelations of high-profile sexual harassment and abuse. And all of these things, miraculously, were politically charged.

Our Kids are Snitches

Running for office requires a hardy hide. Detractors lob accusations as easily as jugglers hurling torches; politicians expect it. But Oklahoma judicial candidate John Mantooth is being pelted by a particularly painful source: his own grown daughter.

Jan Schill (formerly Mantooth) recently took out a newspaper ad that read, “Do Not Vote for My Dad!” on the grounds that he’s “NOT a good father, NOT a good grandfather,” and would make a lousy judge. She launched DoNotVoteForMyDad.com, linking to legal documents that call his integrity into question and describing a Christmas gift she once received from her pop — a box of chocolates infested with worms and weevils.

Eww. I don’t care if you vote for him, but do not under any circumstances invite this guy to a secret Santa swap.

The candidate claims his daughter is embittered by his ugly decades-gone-by divorce from her mother, which may be true. But it’s hard to ignore the shocking shriek of a child blowing the whistle on her own badly behaving begetter.

Cops heeded just such a shriek last week when a 13-year-old New York girl called 911 from the backseat of her mother’s swerving car to report that mom was driving drunk. The good news: Troopers hauled in the besotted mama before anyone was hurt. The bad: Dinnertime conversation at their house will be awkward for quite some time.

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