I feel so bad for Maria Shriver

[CatWoman]

:(

[Arugula Latte]

1. Yeah, but, jeez, what was she thinking marrying that creep in the first place?

Smart woman, stupid major life choice.

[CatWoman]

4. well

I can't hold that against her either.

[shoutinfreud]

25. I found numerous RSVPs to my wedding with that written on them

:(

[Arugula Latte]

41. Oy ...

Not good. :(

[seabeyond]

2. like she didnt know what she was walking into. i didnt know hte man, and i knew what she was

walking into. are you saying you didnt know what she was walking into. be assaults women and probably girls against their will.

geeez

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

14. The empathy. It oozes.

:eyes:

[seabeyond]

17. wouldnt i be making her a victim, less, that she is not clever enough to realize this about the man

i happen to think she is smart. not gonna make her stupid

nothing to do with empathy. everything to do with figuring she knew her own mind. she had her reasons to marry a man she knew was a pig

[shoutinfreud]

26. Wow, the sisterhood is strong here.

[seabeyond]

28. sisterhood include pretending? for real, lol. sisterhood is about honesty

good bad and ugly

i am sure shriver will be jsut fine. probably wanted to divorce him forever ago, but whatever reason chose to stay

cause i a female, am i suppose to pretend she is not smart enough to see what a player arnie was/is?

i dont insult her with such a thing

[KittyWampus]

3. Well, she was in denial. Now she can live her life without that dark shadow.

When things fall apart we have an opportunity to see who our real friends are and decide what we want to establish as our next phase.

[CatWoman]

5. good post, Kitty

meow :hi:

[itsrobert]

6. I could care less. She made her bed.

I feel bad for the people who are not born into wealth and have to fight for survival.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

16. See #14. -nt

[xchrom]

7. I feel bad for her, too. Nt

[DainBramaged]

8. I feel bad for California, we could have defeated the philandering scumbag 8 years ago

if we knew.

[ecstatic]

9. Um... y'all knew about all the gropings and sexual harassment

But most importantly, Californians knew that he simply was not qualified to run the state.

[DainBramaged]

24. k? i CAN'T VOTE IN cALIFORNIA

And why the "y'all knew" was this something only the Right was suppossed to know about?

[CatWoman]

18. very good point, DB

[Johonny]

20. She rode him to the top and dumped on the down

Like a good Ayn Rand Republican so who cares. If only California having done the same had millions to fall back on :)

Had the Kennedy family come out hard against Arnold we might have avoided the pointless last 8 years. Instead too many Dems bought into the social liberal, economic conservative blah that was Arnold's political career. I see Maria as someone that wanted position and power and rode Arnold to the top and is now dumping him because he has no more up side. So what is to feel bad about?

[Cleita]

37. Untrue. She did not want to be a politician's wife and

said so in an interview when rumors were circulating that Arnold would run for governor if the recall against Gov. Grey Davis went through. She did have a change of heart and so he put his hat in the ring, but frankly I think he pressured her into it.

[Johonny]

38. ?

She stayed with him the whole way up, and has now dumped him now that it is over. Who cares what she said. I know know exactly what she did do.

[Cleita]

40. Apparently, you own your own facts, so there is no

point in further pointing out why she probably had stayed with him. It has a lot to do with her religion and with the Kennedy women's way of standing by their man no matter what. I mean grandpapa Joseph Kennedy took his then mistress Gloria Swanson on a cruise he took with wife Rose, Maria's grandma. I think the death of her parents had a lot to do with freeing her up from keeping family tradition to make this decision.

[Cleita]

35. I don't think we could have. Many of us tried.

I believe the fix was in from the first moment that Darryl Issa started the recall campaign against Gov. Grey Davis, which seems like now that it was possibly funded by Koch brothers money. Arnold sashayed around through the whole election cycle like it was a done deal. The whole affair stunk from the beginning to the time he was sworn in.

[WinkyDink]

10. I care only for the snark factor. She married and enabled a REPUBLICAN.

[Luminous Animal]

11. I don't. His womanizing has been apparent long before he ran for office. And during his run,

every woman who came out publicly with stories of being sexually harassed by Arnold, was ridiculed and marginalized. Oprah gave him a national platform, for fuck's sake.

[seabeyond]

15. never watched her show again after that. he made a sexist remark. the two women giggled

told him to stop that, and shriver tried covering his mouth to stop him, but he had to make another crack to let the women know their place. and they sat there, and took it

never watched her show again

i agree with you

[calimary]

22. Yeah. Oprah. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person alive who isn't a fan.

I feel bad for Maria, and especially for the kids, but she had to know he was a philanderer. Maybe she was just so in love she allowed herself to be blinded, and she wouldn't be the first by ANY stretch of the imagination. Wonder how the word got out? I'm guessing that's what broke up the marriage.

republi-CON "Family" "Values." Let's see...

schwarzenegger
newt gingrich
henry hyde
dan burton
donald trump
sarah palin
robert livingstone
bush 1
bush 2
mark sanford
larry craig
john ensign
tom coburn and all those lovely C Street "family guys"

Yeah. Gotta go get me some o' that. :sarcasm:

Anyone notice that in the wake of Bill Clinton's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky, there was NO trail of broken marriages - of either the philanderer OR his partner(s), no illegitimate children from women not their wives, no nothing.

SCUM. That's what republi-CONS are. They want to tell you how to live. But you better not try to examine how they're doing for themselves behind closed doors.

:puke:

[Mrs. Ted Nancy]

29. You are in good company

I've never been a fan of Oprah's talk show. Though, I did like her in The Color Purple.

[Maru Kitteh]

34. same here. n/t

[calimary]

42. I wish I didn't feel that way. I have a friend who thinks Oprah might as well be God.

And I just can't go there.

The woman has a HUGE karmic debt to pay.

You know all those bottom-feeder Jerry Springer/Maury Povich lowest-common-denominator screechers and loudmouths and cheap, tawdry tabloidy stir-'em-ups just for the sake of stirring things up - which also begot the likes of limbaugh and the rest of the hate-radio and hate broadcasting assholes? She's their mother. We wouldn't have gotten there, or gotten there as fast, if it weren't for her.

Back in the day, daytime talk shows weren't three-ring circuses and carnival freak shows and two-minute hatefests. They were dignified and intelligent and engaging and grown-up and insightful. NOT incite-ful. There's A DIFFERENCE. They were engrossing - NOT GROSS. There's A DIFFERENCE! A fellow named Phil Donahue was the leading light. His show aired out of Chicago. He was basically the only game in town - Chicago or anyplace else. You watched that kind of thing for an hour and you came away informed and enlightened and your mind was broadened a little more, and you were rendered a little bit smarter, and you had more to think about, which you usually did for awhile after the show was over. My dad used to watch Donahue every afternoon and sometimes I'd watch it with him. Then evidently somebody decided this charming young Chicago news anchor was worth a shot and gave her a talk show, to take aim at Phil Donahue. And they went directly to Titillation Town. They went straight into the gutter for the "OMG!" factor. I bore my father's brother's uncle's two-headed love child! Lesbian nuns! Nothing was too low or low-brow. And she totally copied Donahue's format - which HAD been unique, where he took a roving mic and went out into the audience and engaged them individually with whatever guest he had on. He did that FIRST. Everybody else was the Merv Griffin or Mike Douglas type, with the host-behind-the-desk and the chairs and sofa, or the chair/side-table/chair configuration for guests up on the stage. She hijacked Donahue's schtick. Nothing unique, just a flat-out copy (well, except she'd grab you by the opposite shoulder and give it a little squeeze while she held that mic in your face).

Soon his ratings were starting to drop. And before too much longer, he was on there doing his show - wearing a skirt. It was really disgraceful. Eventually, she prevailed, driving him off the air. And at that, the dam burst and suddenly we had lesbian nuns and two-headed love children on EVERY show, everywhere, as everybody else got on the bandwagon and copied that titillation-tabloid schtick. The elegance and dignity of an educated, well-articulated, gracefully and thoughtfully presented thinking-man's/thinking-woman's talk show was a thing of the past, relegated to old stuffies like Charlie Rose on PBS.

So yeah, the whole Oprah-worship thing just kinda leaves me cold. I am not a member of the cult. I refuse. That said, I do appreciate her philanthropic efforts, but then again I think ANYONE who's that wealthy and powerful and influential is HUGELY obligated to their community and their fellow men and women. I'm glad to see that she evidently shares that view, and props to her. Perhaps she herself is somehow conscious of that karmic debt. And if so, I can certainly salute that. But the world of the talk show was irrevocably ruined by her going in and competing head-on against Donahue by trying to go low-brow, straight into the garbage, and out-titillate him and knock him off. And she did. And that let all the nuts and flakes and liars and weasels and snake-oil salesman and bearded ladies and two-headed freakazoids and gutter-vermin and other sewer-dwellers in and made them household names and gave them validity and fame and fortune and princely rewards for their bad behavior in the quickly-deteriorating public mindset. It just metastacized like a cancer, up to and including glenn beck and o'reilly and all the rest of the pox noisers. And the rest of the nation has been paying for it ever since.

[Bombero1956]

32. add David Vitter to that list

good old Diaper David

[pintobean]

12. I'm with you, CatWoman

She obviously loved the man. It's unbelievable how many people condemn her for that.

[CatWoman]

19. and their poor kids

:(

[JuniperLea]

13. Me too...

I always wished she had been Gov instead of the cartoon character she married. Love is blind they say... I hope it was love that blinded her, and I hope she had many happy times with him. That's a long time to be married.

[Pisces]

21. She doesn't deserve this. Stay strong Maria!!

[closeupready]

23. I do and I don't.

Obviously, she didn't deserve to be cheated on. At the same time, if she knew he had cheated on her, why didn't she speak up sooner?

And also to state the obvious, her choice is her prerogative, not mine. However, my opinion is MY prerogative, not hers.

So I would just like to know that little bit about this affair before opining with prejudice.

[Maru Kitteh]

27. You get what you pay for.

I wish her nothing but the best in her new life.

[Nedsdag]

30. I don't.

In 2004, she said she didn't like John Kerry types. She knew what she was getting into when she hooked up with him.

[smirkymonkey]

33. At least John Kerry has a brain. Schwarzenegger was basically

a trained ape. Coming from her background I would have been embarrassed to have been seen w/ him, especially knowing what a pig he was.

[karynnj]

36. I thought I might be the only one who remembered that interview

It might actually explain a lot. (Updated: Here is a link to a news article on that interview. http://www.infowars.com/articles/Arnold/shriver_schwarz_wont_be_pres.htm )

From memory, her comment was that within her family, the expected husband would have been someone with John Kerry's background. I suspect she used Kerry as the example because he was obviously the most famous example available. Kerry did date Jackie Kennedy's beautiful stepsister in his high school senior year and freshman college year. From one of the early chapters of Tour of Duty, there were descriptions of Kerry's life while a student at Yale that show that while he was personally not wealthy, he was completely a member of that social elite. He and friends flew to Europe for part of at least some summers and stayed at mansions owned by their relatives, including Kerry's grandparents in France. That was the same social elite that the Kennedys were in. Kerry married the twin sister of his best friend, who was part of that elite.

Maria Schriver bragged in that article that she rejected the family's expectations. I see no reason to criticize her for falling in love with someone outside that world. She was, I think, already well known as a beautiful, capable newscaster - and of course a Kennedy = when she married one of the top entertainment stars. (I wonder if being labeled a "Kennedy" first, even after she had personal success might have played a role.)

I don't really see what anyone could have liked about Arnold as a person or movie star, but millions - and Maria - clearly were attracted. It is very possible that she thought he would be faithful and that between them they would be a couple with incredible star power, which they were. Within the Kennedy family, she, like almost all Kennedys would have some fame and status, but she would never be even close to most famous or iconic. At the point she married, that position was unshakably JFKjr and Caroline's - and marrying anyone acceptable to the family circle would not change that. Even Kerry Kennedy (which I usually write speaking of the name of the precursor bill to SCHIP, not the person) marrying the son of Mario Cuomo.

I wonder if she stayed with him as long as she did because of her kids and her religion.

[HappyMe]

31. Yeah, I feel bad for her too.

Having a marriage fall apart is bad enough. Having it fall apart in front of everybody has to be the worst of nightmares.

[malaise]

39. Well I'm sorry for her as well

but I'd never marry an Arnold.

[lynne]

43. I'm not buying that she didn't know. She's much smarter than that -

- as the child is 10 years old and the woman worked for them for 20 years. Looks to me like she stayed in the marriage until the kids were older and they were out of the governor's mansion. While I wish her and the children the best, no way did she not know what was going on. It just wasn't convenient for her or the family for her to act earlier.