All Better!

And now, the most hilarious thing I have ever read:

One of four ministers who oversaw three weeks of intensive counseling for the Rev. Ted Haggard said the disgraced minister emerged convinced that he is "completely heterosexual."

Haggard also said his sexual contact with men was limited to the former male prostitute who came forward with sexual allegations, the Rev. Tim Ralph of Larkspur told The Denver Post for a story in Tuesday's edition.

Bear in mind, it was intensive counseling. This isn't like Lindsay Lohan going to rehab. Ted actually spent three whole weeks ridding himself of inappropriate sexual thoughts. Now, I know that experts say a month is best when one is trying to readjust one's identity and sexual orientation, but what can I say? Ted's a dynamo.

What you people may not understand about Ted Haggard (or "The Rev," as his hipper congregants called him) is that he comes big or he doesn't come at all. No, wait, let me rephrase that. There's nothing half-assed about Ted Haggard. No, hang on, I can do this...

What I'm saying is that Ted Haggard gives all things 110%. When he's preaching, that means putting it all out there on the stage in honor of his fictional Lord. When he's curing himself of homosexual proclivities, he races through the entire life-altering psychotherapeutic process in a scant 3 weeks. And when he's having gay sex, it's hard and rough and with a prostitute and on methamphetamines. That's just how he fucking roles, okay? Y'all just been Haggarded.

"He is completely heterosexual," Ralph said.

I think it goes without saying. There is nothing more rugged and manly than facing some personal embarrassment and then disappearing for an entire month while having sycophants and PR types extoll your heterosexual, masculine virtue to Associated Press reporters.

What follows may be the single best twisty ludicrous public relations-style spin I have personally ever witnessed. Someone fire Tony Snow now because this guy needs to work for Karl Rove.

"That is something he discovered. It was the acting-out situations where things took place. It wasn't a constant thing."

You see, folks, it's simple. Just because he did speed and had sex with a man on multiple occasions does not mean that Ted Haggard is gay. He was jsut acting out situations where things were taking place.

Imagine you're at a trendy downtown nightclub and you happen to notice a very attractive member of your own gender dancing nearby. So you walk over to them and engage them in conversation. So far, I think we can all agree that there is nothing untoward or sexually inappropriate going on. Just two same-sex individuals conversing.

Now, imagine that this other individual of your own gender begins doing crystal meth and having sex with you. It is conceivable that you might simply walk away, but let's say, merely for the sake of argument, that you do not. Let's say, hypothetically, that you also do some of the crystal meth and have some of the sex. Does this make you gay, simply because your immediate situation involves sticky hot gayness going on that you may or may not (but, you know, are) taking active part in?

And that's what happened to Ted Haggard. See, he realized this during his little mountain retreat, and so he feels all better now and is ready to get back to being a fraud hustler mincing closet caricature insane hypocritical douchebag therapist.

Wow, really? I guess the strikeouts don't lie...

Haggard said in an e-mail Sunday, his first communication in three months to church members, that he and his wife, Gayle, plan to pursue master's degrees in psychology. The e-mail said the family hasn't decided where to move but that they were considering Missouri and Iowa.

Shouldn't it be Masters' Degrees? No one get's a Master Degree, and besides, we're talking about two degrees. Masters is plural so in the possessive it gets an apostrophe.

Ralph said the board spoke with people close to Haggard while investigating his claim that his only extramarital sexual contact happened with Mike Jones. The board found no evidence to the contrary.

"If we're going to be proved wrong, somebody else is going to come forward, and that usually happens really quickly," he said. "We're into this thing over 90 days and it hasn't happened."

So I'm reading this article and I'm wondering, do these guys really believe their own bullshit? It's so much easier for me to think of them as old-fashioned charlatans, snake-oil salesmen who know they're full of shit. Like in "The Music Man." Maybe even feel a little bad about it at the end of the day, you know? But, hey, that's the family business, everyone's gotta make a dime.

But what's the point of all this silly deception. Are they really fooling anyone with this "investigation" and his three-week "rehabilitation." I mean, they waited for 90 days and because a mob of closeted gay men didn't break down the doors of their church and announce ongoing affairs with Ted Haggard, they're declaring him free and clear of Teh Ghey. It's just insane.

I mean, it's such a mixed message. They spend months and months, years really, drilling into parishoners heads that there's a radical gay agenda, that San Francisco is overrun with evil gays who want to pervert America's children. Then one of them reveals that he's had lots of gay sex, but it's easily curable! So on the one hand, being gay makes you diseased and sick and evil, but it can go away faster than salmonella poisoning if only you read the Bible, like, every day for at least an hour.