Once upon a time, if you had a problem keeping the gin bottle in your liquor cabinet or your naughty bits in your clothes, you kept it to yourself. Why after all would anyone reveal their disgusting character flaws in public?

In this century, we know the answers: 1) Fame and 2) Royalties. Just ask Susan Cheever. Having earned her advance back for her past revelations about her problem with the sauce, she returns to the money well with a new volume celebrating her career as a slag.

Excuse us – as a sex addict. We'll admit, there's probably some cheap thrills to be had imagining the short, moon faced, and vaguely grandmotherly Cheever wrestling with the UPS man, the pizza delivery boy, the sauna repair guy, and other porn staples, but ultimately who cares?

Had she kept her struggles to herself and used them to inform fictive recountings of flawed but noble WASPs struggling to make sense out of their empty, futile lives, she might have had something readable. After all, it worked for her father, the brilliant – and notoriously private – John Cheever.

We admit, this one almost seems too easy, and, with Keith Olbermann riffing on Bill as Ted Baxter Mondays through Fridays, almost unsporting. On the other hand, Bill's been mailing it in for years; why shouldn't we?

Bill's been churning out unreadable falafel at the rate of a book a year. That pays for lots of sexual harassment settlements, but with America's forest resources dwindling away, someone has to call a halt.

Maybe it will be the book-buying public. Even in his target demo (65 to 118), how much appetite could there be for warmed-over tales of his days in parochial school, his boyhood in a log cabin in Levittown, his views on Seinfeld, and his fearless advocacy of anything that Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch want him to say?

With America electing a President whose core values – honesty, integrity, tolerance, modesty, self-control, intelligence, and thoughtfulness – are antithetical to everything that the $8 million a year friend of the people (especially if they're bodacious but defenseless assistant producers) stands for, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that America may be passing Bill O by.  

At this rate, he may not outlive his audience.

Even Madonna couldn't have reinvented herself with the brazenness of unrepentant bombthrower Bill Ayers, transformed first into a pillar of the yuppie intelligentsia of Hyde Park, then into a martyr, and now into someone willing to trade on his sordid past and the election of his non-pal to pay for that custom kitchen of which he and Bernadine have always dreamed.

We all make mistakes in our misspent youth, although most of them tend to involve throwing up on our prom date, not blowing up buildings. We didn't apologize to Junie Jo Prewitt for ruining her evening; why should Bill and his equally bloodthirsty spouse be any different?

After all, as he never tires of telling sympathetic audiences, he never tried to kill someone by planting bombs, so that's pretty much OK then.  Of course, his old buddy Kathy Boudin didn't meant to kill that poor police officer in the course of her bank robbery, but, hey, s*** happens. 

We don't have much sympathy for torturers, mad bombers, and other practitioners of sanctimonious violence (in a cause other than self-defense), so we aren't planning to plunk down what remains of our life savings for the memoirs of Bill Ayers, Dick Cheney, Fredo Gonzales, the leadership of Hamas, or others of their ilk, whether or not they live in our plummy neighborhoods, buy lattes at our coffee shops, or blather piously about how much they've changed.