couldnt understand the wretched part

Joe Wilson is good people, and Valerie, who is downright wonderful, would never be married to excrement like the congressclown from SC.

I'm glad they got the hell out of Washington and are living much better lives in New Mexico.

Joe cut his hair shorter and dropped something like 50 pounds. You wouldn't recognize him if all you have is photos from ten or even five years ago. Valerie looks fabulous as usual (as you can tell, I did NOT drop 50 pounds LOL):

[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]

He was a little heavy then, as I recall.

IMO, they were both heroes. And the Bush admin. put them through pure hell.

Are they fully retired now or employed?

Valerie is doing some writing, Joe has done some already, and both are doing the lecture circuit and some pro bono speaking gigs.

They have both wound their stress levels WAY down. I'm jealous. But they got put through some evil shit by Cheneybush, as you noted, and they very nearly fell apart because of it. Aside from a few hour-long interrogations in what was then East Germany, I never had to go through anything like that, and aside from a few morons who apparently didn't know that Pennsylvania is not in Europe (no joke, but a long story), never anything deliberate from our own government.

I hope they are still making a good living off of their royalties. Her movie deal must have been good for them financially. And they both have pensions I am sure.

I wish I believed in Hell because I'd love to think of Cheney roasting there eventually for what he did to two good people...

I'd never ask them that, of course, but they seem to be OK financially. New Mexico isn't as expensive to live in as suburban Washington. Plus, they are pretty much stress-free, and that is worth more than any amount of money can compensate. Both of them freely admit that the Cheney persecution nearly broke them apart. But now they are solidly together, and Cheney is an evil sack of spare parts.

but it all helps.

I'll tell you, I worked in Washington for over 9 years and couldn't wait to get out and move to New England. I detest that city. Joe and Valerie's story just confirmed what I had felt about D.C.

I moved to Dallas at the end of 1982. I grew up in Virginia, but spent lots of time in DC. Went to school there for a few years (commuted with my dad into town and back--he was a hotshot journalist, president of the Gridiron club, etc). Loved Georgetown, played balalaika for the exiled Russians on their holidays, hung around the Capitol and the White House with my dad, etc. He was on a first name basis with guys with names like Javits, Kennedy, Humphrey, Church, Mondale, Ford, you get the idea.

But when I left, I made a clean break. At age 16, went to school in Catalonia, then a year of concentration camp, er, I mean, boarding school, in Mass. and then on to college in Filthydelphia. When I joined the outfit I still work for today, my first position was based out of Massachusetts, and both I and my future wife loved it up there. She's German, but came over for short visits, and one long one. Even today, we travel every year all the way from the German Rheinland to Cape Cod to recharge our batteries for a few weeks. If I'm ever mothballed (or decide to do it myself) back to the USA, I'm heading for New England, too.

What happened to Joe and Valerie represents the absolute basest, meanest, most disgusting side of what people in power will do to satisfy their own petty vindictiveness (how dare Joe report the truth when Cheney refused to, right?). Not all of DC is like that, but it is definitely a town where it is discouragingly easy to get swayed by the Dark Side.

We lost to them in a shooting match (I was on the varsity rifle team), if I remember correctly. I was a one-year senior (good thing--I would have never gone back if I weren't graduating) at a place in Andover, Mass. It was called Phillips Academy. The faculty was furious that we had elected as class president a smart ghetto black guy from Oakland, so they made up all sorts of "offenses" to harass him. It didn't work, of course, and he ended up at Harvard. They harassed me for fun, too, to some degree, although some of the teachers were actually decent guys. We were forced to attend religious services every Sunday, but allowed us to attend churches of "other" faiths if they were nearby. I despised the religious goons at Andover, so I declared myself to be "Unitarian" and hoped for the best. I lucked out. They picked me up from the campus on Sunday morning, drove me to the church an asked, "do you want to attend the service or hang with the young people in the kitchen until we're done?" Then they let me play Doors tunes on the church organ, and drove me back. You wouldn't BELIEVE how many converts I made to Unitarianism at Andover for the second semester!! You'd think I was the most successful missionary ever.

The guy who interviewed me for the school in 1968 was a congressman from Texas named George H.W. Bush, by the way. Nice guy and all, but not a lot of shining candlepower, I thought, and if you had told me what he would be doing 20 years later, I would have told you that there was more of a chance I would be doing that job than he would. I never met his arrogant son, who had graduated a few years before I got there. I met plenty of spoiled, haughty, prep school guys like him, though. Let's just say it was not exactly a mutual admiration society.

In Germany, they encourage kids of high school age to take a semester or a year of high school abroad (when I did it in 1968, it was considered revolutionary). My elder daughter attended a public day school in our neighborhood in Dallas. In Germany, the USA counted as a "foreign" destination, and was thus OK for her school in Düsseldorf. The younger one wanted to do it differently, and asked to go to a boarding school. I said, OK, there are plenty of them in New England. She said no, it was too cold there. I said, what is this, you are making all these demands all of a sudden? What do you want, Hawaii? Knowing perfectly well that I wasn't being serious, she nevertheless said, sure, that sounded good. I said, "dream on, kid." To make a long story short, she ended up spending two years at Hawai'i Preparatoy Academy in Waimea on the Big Island. Needless to say, today, at age 28, she is already a very successful international lawyer!

marine program. My daughter wanted her to row crew but she said absolutely not and opted for ice hockey. She's going to the Caribbean with her class for a marine study there in the winter. So there's a lot the school can offer her.