I AM NOT MY MOM’S KID

Be as nasty as you like to Dr. Laura Schlessinger at this difficult time -- after all, she’d do the same to you.

Anyone who’s listened to her show for even a few minutes knows that she doesn’t give a damn about extenuating circumstances that might explain why callers have fallen short in some area of their lives -- she accepts no excuses and expresses no sympathy. She hates the sin and despises the sinner.

So fire away, people.

Unfortunately, you’ll have a hard time trying to play “Gotcha!” with Dr. Laura on her neglect of her mother -- she made her estrangement from Mom clear over the years, and her allies have already forgiven her for it.

Carefully drawing a cordon sanitaire around the precise borders of one’s own lapses while condemning strikingly similar lapses by other people is, of course, what we expect from the right-wing morality police. Thus, Republicans assailed Bill Clinton for adultery, but when the philandering of Henry Hyde, J. C. Watts, Bob Barr, Newt Gingrich, and other Republicans was revealed, adultery became OK as long as it didn’t involve lying under oath. And when it was revealed that Barr may well have lied about sex under oath in a civil procedure, we were told that Clinton's great moral shame was lying about sex under oath in a criminal investigation.

Dr. Laura pitilessly insists that everyone must put family above all other concerns, but she gave herself permission not to care about her own aging parent.

Many adult children lost parents in the fall -- adult children lose parents all the time. Some of those adult children were estranged from those parents -- but even many of the estranged children probably grieved. Laura Schlessinger didn’t grieve back in the fall. Laura Schlessinger didn’t have a clue her mother was dead.

Save your tears for someone else.