You can't retort a 'your mom' joke with a 'your mom' joke ten minutes later. I mean, I don't know what you can do, but not that, certainly.

Oh, I suppose it's a question of the role in question. It might not be reasonable for an older woman to expect to be cast as the ingenue, for instance. On the other hand, maybe they are legitimately disadvantaged? Whatever the substance, I'm sure you'll understand that it would be politically inexpedient for me to…

Yes, 'tough-minded' as in 'What newspapers do you read?'

Your mom. Postcoital.

Gentle Herpes is a scholar and a gentleman and I will not hear anything spoken against him.

or 3) by some sacred mystery, eminently bangable at the age of seventy.

It's the Eighth Wonder of the World.

It's a very good point. Though, to be fair, that hasn't been a problem for Helen Mirren. On the other hand, she's Helen fucking Mirren.

I think that makes more sense. I think if you genuinely see a particular story as illustrative of something more you want to say, it works. If you just want to make a film for really no othe reason than that it is or was a cause celebre, you can already see it in the cultural trash bin. There's something fradulent…

Gel into what exactly, though, I wonder. I hope it's the greatest film ever made. Far be it for me to be uncharitable toward Clint Eastwood. Seems like less than an inspired idea to me, but what do I know?

I can't judge the movie that hasn't been made yet, but doesn't it seem like there's an endless stream of ones that are made for seemingly no other reason save that they're about something that was a major story for a while in the American media, often while the events are still unfolding? Is that movitation the basis…

This sounds boring as shit. Why would anyone with a scintilla of artistic vision think this inanity would be worth dramatizing?

That is a little surprising I guess, yes. It's just I think they write these things to be as open-ended as possible at times so that they have maximize scope for prosecution. It's like the statute you quoted: 'X can be specific things a, b, and c, and also d; d being such a wildly broad range of things, we didn't…

In writing a statute, they define what they like as what they like for the purpose of what they like. If they want to create absurd legalistic technical terms, they can do that. They aren't the arbiters of the English language, however. My entire point was that expanding 'WMD' to include all destructive devices…

I'm hoping the sheer force of snark in this piece will scupper this comeback.

There are plenty of real ones of hers since the last Clinton presidency, but all ones that the GOP heartily agree with and reveal her to be one of them, so they don't talk about those.

Okay, so they define WMD to include all bombs. That's totally inconsistent with the usage history of WMD, which was meant to designante a special category of unconventional, NBC-weapons, and obviously renders it descriptively useless. The government can write a statute defining 'koala bear' to mean a hula-hoop if…

I'm not sure what you're intending to say with this, though.

I did, which is why I upvoted it.

I'm going to say it's more than five. WMD meant nuclear warheads primarily, also chemical and biological. The whole point was to coin a term for non-conventional payloads that kill more than five people. To define it more broadly is to render the term descriptively useless. They're just children who don't think…