Ever see this list? It gets handed around, quoted, self-righteously cited, and shouted about. George Will printed it in one of his columns in 1987, Bill Bennett wrote about it, and in his own published offal in 1993, Rush Limbaugh used it as an example of how the liberals had ruined America. That pedigree alone ought to make you nervous.

What were the main problems in school in 1940? (You know, back in the Good Old Day, when white men ruled the world, rape didn't exist unless a white man accused a black man of it, when women knew their place, and when black people were just as much enslaved as they were in 1840, except for a few pretenses? Those good old days?)

According to this list, the main things that schools had to worry about then went something like this:

1. talking

2. chewing gum

3. making noise

4. running in the halls

5. getting out of turn in line

6. wearing improper clothing

7. not putting paper in the wastebaskets

It's such a very white list, is what comes to mind. I imagine black kids who had to share books and worry about getting harassed, or beaten up, or attacked or killed might have something of a different list---along with any woman who had to deal with the sexual mores of the day, which offered women exactly two roles: good or bad.

By1980, according to the same list, the problems had changed. Now they were:

1. drug abuse

2. alcohol abuse

3. pregnancy

4. suicide

5. rape

6. robbery

7. assault

(I especially like the fact that rape is included here, because the list is so obviously written from the perspective of somebody who doesn't give a shit about what women say, live through, or endure.)

Well, in any event, in 1994, a Yale professor named Barry O'Neill got curious about the list and did some poking around. First he tracked it to James Robison, a Texas megachurch pastor who got acquainted with a singularly inept good ole boy named George W. Bush in the seventies and eighties, when said Bush was calling himself George W. Bush junior. In an era when the Clintons' participation in a minor failed real estate deal was big news, Bush's repeated fleecing of investors----or selling access to himself as a future governor and President---got almost no serious notice outside of Texas. Venture after venture of the younger Bush failed, yet rich donors who knew his daddy never failed to step up to the plate and rescue Junior. Reverend Robison had a megachurch full of potential campaign donors, who in turn could afford to try and trade a few dozen K into future positions in Bush's cabinet or staff.

But Robison hadn't written the list.

The Reverand's part led, in turn, to someone I've written about before: T. Cullen Davis. Who is T. Cullen Davis? Happy you asked!

Before OJ, and a bit after Sam Shepperd and Jeffrey MacDonald, there was T.Cullen Davis except he got away with it. Davis was married to a beautiful woman named Priscilla whose company he now found tiresome. One warm Texas evening as she returned to her house with her new boyfriend, Stan Farr---the divorce by then was two years in the making and still not finished--- Priscilla was attacked and shot by a man whose face and voice she recognized. He shot her and her boyfriend, then shot a young man who heard the shouting and shooting from the road. He also shot and killed Priscilla's twelve-year-old daughter, Andrea. There were no signs of a struggle. Andrea knew him and trusted him.

At trial, Racehorse Haynes freely slut shamed Priscilla, who was well-endowed and refused to be coy about it. She was also from the wrong side of the tracks and liked to make her opinions known. Rich Texas society either loved her or hated her, and in daring to first marry such a rich man and then divorce him, she had given everyone an excuse to hate her. The way Haynes talked about her she was a pill-popping, white trash junkie who married above her station and then tried to cash in even further.

After a long expensive trial, Davis was acquitted. Twelve-year-old Andrea had been marched into the basement by a man she'd known and trusted half her short life, who killed her because she was in the way of his killing her mother---and getting away with it.

Sometime later, T.Cullen David was arrested and tried again for paying a hitman to kill Priscilla and a judge, but even though his voice was on tape, he was once again acquitted in a Rodney-Kind-esque nitpicking extravaganza that Republicans seem to think is a birthright. Rich conservative Texans, apparently, having embraced religious Republicanism with a vengeance, do not find murdering twelve-year-old girls so disgusting as they do the idea that one measly child equals a rich man who might presumably contribute to somebody's political career in the near future.

After his multiple acquittals, T. Cullen David proceeded to find religion and lose his fortune---which his father had built up----although it's not clear in what precise order these events occurred. Cynics might be tempted to point out that a genuinely decent person would not need a near brush with getting hoist by one's petard to reconsider one's sinning ways, especially seeing as how the toll of Cullens' sins cost other people far more than it did him: he killed two people and partially paralyzed another young man, who can walk only with crutches to this day.

Cullen searched near and wide for a spiritual teacher. Okay, well, maybe he went to a country club or two. In this quest for Jesus he finally found a role model in the person of....you guessed it....James Robison.

Davis wrote the lists that George Will, Bill Bennett and Rush Limbaugh find so alluring. I might be interested---on my more cynical days----in taking lessons in murder and escaping justice from a double murderer like Davis, but him lecturing on morality is like a madam in a whorehouse lecturing on chastity. One could take the lists apart in about a zillion different ways, the principle being that I could care less if some rich white murdering asshole hypocrite thinks rape didn't happen in the Forties, but why bother?

If you needed any further evidence how vile any of these people are, there you have it.

And if you needed any further proof just how awesome Molly Ivins is, there you go, because this little expose appears on pages 63-64 of Shrub: the short but happy political life of George W. Bush. Amongst other gems, she's already tackled how he, like so many Republicans of the Viet Nam generation, either avoided service or inflated it---he once claimed to have served on 'active duty'. Water under the bridge and all that, but Cheney having recently emerged from his coffin or sarcophagus or whatever to drink more virgins' blood or brew more of the elixir that he needs to keep himself going for another thirty-seven years before his next feeding, it's important that this stuff is remembered.