Say What??!!?

I'm sorry, I must have simply missed it, so this may be a trifle vieux jeux for some of you News Junkies who turn your noses up at anything older than three hours. But here goes anyway.

In an article gauging the length and frequency of Harriet Miers' lingual ministrations to the posterior of the Governor of Texas in the Nineties, we learn of the icky little mash notes she frequently wrote to her hero. "Hopefully, Jenna and Barbara recognize that their parents are 'cool'--as do the rest of us," she gushes, apparently incapable of embarrassment. (This just in: You can read them in all their saccharine glory at The Smoking Gun.)

George's response to a particularly sniveling birthday greeting has got me blinking, flummoxed, unable to parse what I read:

I appreciate your friendship and candor -- never hold back your sage advice.

All my best

George

P.S. No more public scatology

"No... more... public...."

What in the name of ten thousand whooping Christs did he mean by that? What did he think he meant?

Can you imagine him (I certainly can) saying that verbally rather than in writing, one of those rancid little jokes that he tosses out in informal settings, accompanied by that staccato little laugh and shoulder-jerk that Jon Stewart caricatures so expertly: "Oh, and Harry, one more thing... No more pub-lic sca-tol-ogy, heh-heh, heh-heh!"

Maybe he thought he was saying eschatology, "a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of mankind." We Comp. Rel. undergrads used to get a barrel o' laffs out of the near-homonym. Maybe Harriet had been shooting her mouth off at the Texas Lottery Commission: "Oh, who cares who wins Double Zingo Scratch-Off? My chauffeur didn't show up for work this morning, and if he wasn't Raptured, I'm a monkey's red heinie. Or a Supreme Court Justice."

Yeah, that's the sort of thing that you don't want your Lottery Commissioner saying in public. That'd earn you the old Goobernatorial Rebuke, running around saying the world's ending, jabbering about seven-headed beasts and Texas Two-Step MegaMillions Powerball and eight-legged goats and antichrists and such. That's the sort of thing you want to keep relatively private.

Come to think of it, you don't suppose it should just be taken literally, at face value? "Hey, Harriet, knock off the interest in or treatment of obscene matters esp. in literature!" No? How about, "Hey Harry, you've got to kibosh the biologically oriented study of excrement (as for taxonomic purposes or for the determination of diet)!"

Well. Considering just how far her nose was inserted up the Goobernatorial Poop Chute, maybe that's exactly what he meant.