THREE! HUN! DRED! SIX! TY! FIVE! DE! GREES!

A fortnightly rant FL-S style, Labor Day Weekend Bulldog Edition, with a h/t to L.A. County’s bravest.

Fire consumes homes in La Crescenta neighborhood of Los Angeles County. (photo by Robert Gauthier, LA Times)

I feel truly sorry for the people of the City of Angels.

With scores of entertainment/media conglomerate-running fornicators, cohabitators, and homosexuals as residents, the fires that have engulfed a good portion of the nation’s second-largest metro were bound to be nothing less than…biblical.

And just as he proclaimed four years ago this week in regards to Hurricane Katrina’s raison d’être, with so much heaven-sanctioned authority, Pat Robertson on his TV show must have been all I told you so, you heathens in proclaiming that La La Land’s culture of carnal delight preordained this week’s raging, deadly infernoes.

Or to paraphrase political pundit John McLaughlin, “(they were) a metaphysical certitude.”

Fox and Friends gadfly and former kiddie klown/DC-area weatherman Steve Doocy.

Move over Doppler 9000, Hurricane Pat channels his meteorology by way of a much higher authority! (And no, I do not mean Fox and Friends’ sophomoric spitball master and former Channel 4 in Washington kiddie klown/weatherman, Steve Doocy.)

But Pat from Virginia Beach troubles me: why does he feel so compelled to cross state lines, to ferret out so much impure thought and action and Sodom and Gomorrah’s Weather on the 6’s when there’s so much ungodliness right here in the Old (Testament) Dominion?

Why isn’t the good Rev. Robertson aiming his fire and brimstone at the easy targets in his own backyard, like Newport News House Delegate Phil Hamilton? As reported Aug. 21 in the Virginian Pilot:

Old Dominion University has severed its $40,000-a-year contract with Del. Phillip Hamilton after e-mails made it clear that the powerful lawmaker expected to be hired by a teacher training center at ODU when he sponsored the center’s startup funding.

And if that’s not bad enough, the article turns up the propane, even further:

On Feb. 26, 2007, Hamilton wrote that the center would receive $500,000 in fiscal 2008 and added: “Currently, my part-time salary with NNPS is around $37,000. I need at least that amount from the ODU Foundation to have a part-time salary of $75,000 per year. Of course, more than that is always appreciated.”

Infernal email. Probably the invention of a wicked fire-breathing fornicator!

By investigating his fellow House Republican's conduct, Va. House Speaker 'Fire Marshall' Bill Howell (R-Falmouth Light) has effectively thrown Del. Phil Hamilton under the raging wheels of Hook & Ladder Number 666.

The revelations have caused a flash fire so intense in the Commonwealth that Hamilton’s own leader, House Speaker ‘Fire Marshall’ Bill Howell (Falmouth Light), called on the House Ethics Advisory Panel to investigate the powerful Tidewater area lawmaker, to determine whether or not (Hamilton’s) actions constituted violations of Virginia’s Comprehensive Conflict of Interest Act.

You just know things have to be extremely dire if Fire Marshall Bill felt compelled to throw one of his own lieutenants under the raging wheels of Hook and Ladder Number 666.

Back to Pat: I suppose the venal acts of neighbors – such as Hamilton’s getting his hand stuck in the ODU Foundation cookie jar – don’t count as much as the carnal knowledge being doled out (hundreds of miles away in Hollywood, in Greenwich Village, and in the Lower Ninth Ward).

But then of course, it’s been an interesting week for the Rev. Dr. Weatherman.

Robertson’s apostle, St. Bob McDonnell, unintentionally let slip in an interview with WaPo reporter Amy Gardner that 20 years ago – as a 34-year old Regent University grad student – he wrote a 93-page bodice ripper of a thesis entitled The Republican Party’s Vision for the Family.

McDonnell’s meticulous and passion-filled screed, which surely took the committed culture warrior at least a full year to research and write, rails against the evils of working women, day care providers, homosexuals … and yes … cohabitators and fornicators.

Fast-forward 20 years and Candidate for Virginia Governor in 2009 Bob McDonnell is sidling away from the thesis he wrote in 1989, trying instead to re-frame his run for Virginia’s Executive Mansion in language that is middle of the road voter-comforting, but also as WaPo’s Sept. 1st, 2009 lead editorial described, soporific.

Supposedly expunged from his current-day dogma are the anti-working woman, anti-gay, anti-premarital relations core-beliefs that so many committed Virginia social conservatives had come to associate with the once Delegate and Attorney General. In its place is the kinder, gentler McDonnell Version 2.0 that is jawing almost-exclusively on job creation and business development.

Anyone that knows me recognizes that I’m a huge Virginia job-creation and business development proponent, but here’s where Bob’s dropping the fire-blanket on top of his long ago established beliefs has me inclined to sound the alarm.

He was a 34 year-old man when he wrote his manifesto…er, thesis. At that time, he’d already experienced at least 10 years of his post-college life on his own: McDonnell had gotten married, raised the first two of his kids, earned a respectable living, I assume became a law-abiding and productive member of society that like most people grumbled about taxes, and so on.

In my profession as an executive recruiter, I deal with scores of ambitious careerists in their mid to late 30s entering the pinnacles of their careers. To borrow from Richmond-born novelist Tom Wolfe, each and every one of them is a man (or woman) in full.

That’s why I am rendered puzzled, skeptical – and to some degree cynical – by McDonnell’s campaign re do. In my long career, I’ve never met anyone that spent thousands of dollars in grad school tuition and a year’s worth of time writing and publishing a thesis that he or she didn’t stand behind or believe in his or her heart.

I truly believe that Bob McDonnell was 100% truthful (to his core-beliefs) when he wrote his 1989 thesis. And there is nothing to suggest to me that he’s strayed from his beliefs, 20 years later.

But then, in a conference call with reporters on Monday, McDonnell did what amounted to a cut-and-run. From msnbc.com:

Since 1989, my views on a number of things have changed,” he told reporters on the call. “I am fully supportive of women working in the workplace. My wife works, my daughters work.”

Really? So, Bob, if your views have changed then why has it taken until now – just as this whole thesis kerfluffle blows up in your face – to learn about it?

Personally, I think he’s doing a poor job at damage control. And, even though he said a number of views of his have changed, I wonder what he means by number: TWO THINGS? (Two is a number, afterall.)

My gut says this leopard hasn’t changed its spots: I do not believe that Bob McDonnell has abandoned his circa-1989 antideluvian coda.

And that’s why every female voter in the Commonwealth should be worried about what a Gov. McDonnell might do in office, such as…oh, I dunno…supporting his friend Del. Bob Marshall’s bill making it a criminal act when a woman fails to report a miscarriage to her OB-GYN.

And where’s Fire-Starter Pat on all this bru-ha-ha?

Is the almighty telling him to smack his gubernatorial candidate/disciple square on the ass with a switch to set him back on the straight and narrow? Or is the voice in Pat’s head telling him to just leave McDonnell alone?

Either way, on Tuesday November 3rd you, the electorate of the Commonwealth of Virginia, better show up at the polls donning your asbestos underwear. There is going to be a lotta chafin’ goin’ on!

That is all. Have a great Labor Day holiday, everyone. Stay safe. And remember what Smokey the Bear says: “only you can prevent forest fires!”