Nemo Me Impune Lacessit

How do you solve a problem like Ann Altmouse?

I'm drawn to her frothy girlishness, and that lunatic impersonation of joie de vivre with which she tries to submerge her sour disposition. I admire her understanding of the Law, which is so profound that she has no need to demonstrate it, and can, as it were, “waste the jury’s time by rating the Superhunks.”

I marvel at the suppleness of her mind, which allows her to complain about manipulative editing on television, while not only deleting reader comments, but paraphrasing and mocking them, so that the whole gogglin' world can see just how misguided her enemies are. I quail before the moral ferocity of a “conservative blogress diva” who shares with the Black Watch the chilling motto Nemo me impune lacessit.

And above all, at the risk of sinking into an erotic reverie from which I may never recover, I must admit that her lips have much the same effect on me that shaved, baby-oiled goats had on the late William Rehnquist.

And yet, in the end, I can’t quite approve of her. Perhaps it’s the fact that she’s the leader of a criminal syndicate in Kowloon, which smuggles defective and dangerous bootleg toys into American stores. Perhaps it’s her probable involvement in the mysterious disappearance of a group of “hippies” camped at the Stonehenge monument in 1971. Perhaps it’s the grey-green nimbus of barnyard stench that plays about her like corpusants about the yard-arms of the Pequod. Or perhaps it’s merely her robotic, dead-hearted partisanship.

Whatever the cause, I think it’s best that I refrain from linking to her blog, now or ever. Not so much for my own sake, mind you, as for the sake of blogger ethics, and those feckless, impressionable readers whom fate has put in my charge. I hope Ms. Altmouse will understand that it's nothing personal.