Albanyguy

My guess would be that, like many narcissists, he can't bear his own company. He constantly needs other people around to pay attention to him and provide him with the validation that he can't find within himself. Solitude makes him uncomfortable. When he's alone he feels dead inside, he only comes alive when he has an audience. That's why he has the adoring bobble-head wife and the army of kids.

You can't masturbate at all, single or married. In their world, masturbation is considered a loathsome sin, just like viewing porn. When a man masturbates, he is wasting the precious seed that God intended for him to use for only one purpose - to impregnate his wife. And a woman masturbating would be considered sinful because she's doing something selfish instead of devoting her energy to serving Jesus and her family. And speaking of a woman serving Jesus and her family, I have a terrible hunch that right now Anna is purposing to get pregnant again as soon as possible. Anna has always been obsessed with popping out babies and having one now would carry great symbolic weight for her. It would be her way of showing the world that she has forgiven Josh for cheating, that Josh has forgiven her for causing him to cheat (UGH!), that their marriage is back on track and that God has blessed her with a tiny little reward for her steadfastness...a "miracle baby". I hope I'm wrong, but we can't underestimate how deep into the Gothard kool-aid she's always been. As sorry as I feel for what she's going through right now, I've never liked Anna. I think she's just as phony and self-absorbed as any of the other Duggars. When she married Josh, she fully embraced her in-laws' values and reveled in the relative luxury of her new life. She was always happy to use her sisters-in-law as unpaid servants whenever Michelle released them from their duties at the TTH. I think that she will stay with Josh at least in part because, even in their newly-reduced circumstances, she has a better shot at a comfortable lifestyle with him than she would if she returned to the grinding poverty of the Kellers.

Plus, he's a very ordinary-looking young man, neither handsome enough nor ugly enough to be memorable. Even those of us who've seen his face hundreds of times could walk right past him in a crowd and not recognize him (unless, of course, he was doing something Duggarish to attract our attention). If he introduced himself to a potential sex partner as "Joe" and resisted the temptation to brag about being famous, he could probably indulge himself safely. If you spend a lot of time answering ads on those sites, you quickly become accustomed to meeting people who look nothing like the photos in their ads. While most don't post photos of an entirely different person (although Josh wouldn't be the first), it's more common than not for someone to use a picture from when he was ten years younger or thirty pounds lighter, or a picture in which his face is hidden in shadows. Then they play the law of averages. Some people they rendezvous with will be disappointed and turn them down. Others will shrug and think "Well, nobody's perfect...my picture doesn't look much like me either...he seems nice enough...let's give it a whirl." Josh may have gotten lucky once or twice.

"Fox and Friends" (the Fox News morning show) just did a story on the Ashley Madison hacking scandal. They did not mention Josh's name once.

Huckabee is nothing if not a pragmatic politician. Up until now, he's maintained his relationship with the Duggars and defended Josh because, despite their brand being tarnished by the molestation scandal, they've still been useful to him. But at some point he's going to decide that their liabilities outweigh their usefulness and when that happens, he's going to stop returning their phone calls and riding to their rescue when they get in trouble. He may have reached that point last night.

I just checked this one out and, wow, she's crazier than Michelle Duggar, Jill Rodrigues and Teri Maxwell all rolled into one. And under all that Jesus stuff, she sound like one of the meanest, ugliest people on Earth. Maybe she's finally gone off the deep end and is having a phantom pregnancy. I'm only half-kidding here.

. Take a good look at the Rodrigues Family, Jessa, because that's where you're headed.

I think that's very true, and I also think that Jim Bob is jealous of Josh because Josh is the only one of her children that Michelle really loves.

"I'm still big...it's reality television that's gotten small!"

I would have thought a bigger issue for Michelle would be Starbucks' uncompromising support for gay marriage and gay rights in general. If there's a company on earth the Duggars should be boycotting, it's Starbucks.

Well, of course He does. King James worked really hard writing that Bible. Jim Bob himself told us so. That will always be one of my favorite bits of Jim Bob stupidity. I'd love to point out to him that when King James wasn't busy "writing" the Bible, he was busy having hot man-on-man sex with his boyfriend, the Duke of Buckingham. There wouldn't be enough AquaNet in the world to keep Jim Bob's head from exploding.

I wonder if he'll actually go through with the wedding once it sinks in that all he'll be getting is Amy herself, not TV stardom, a cushy seat on the Duggar Easy Livin' Train and a ton of free goodies. The only time they laugh is at someone else's discomfort: a little boy who falls in a pit, a little girl with her head stuck in a railing, a bridal couple whose car has been trashed, a girl scared of clowns. Those all may seem like trifling little incidents, but they add up to a pattern of selfishness and cruelty. These are ugly, mean people, even beyond their hateful political posturing.

I think a lot of it is certainly fear-based (anything you enjoy is a snare set by the Devil), but a lot of it can be chalked up to just plain laziness on Jim Bob and Michelle's part. They feel that they're doing enough just to cover their kids' basic needs for food and shelter, and even that is shoved off onto other people as much as possible. They have no desire to spend any time getting to know their children and fostering individual interests. And I don't think that they even see their children as individuals, they see them as appendages of themselves. Jim Bob and Michelle themselves have no interests beyond kissing and groping each other, making babies and showing off in public. They assume that all their kids want to grow up to be just like them and replicate their lives. They'd probably be honestly surprised at the idea that their kids might be interested in anything else. Also, we can't overlook the cult angle here. Like all cult leaders, Gothard stresses unquestioning obedience and blind conformity. His followers are cogs in the machine, identical foot-soldiers in God's army. Cult members aren't allowed to have hobbies or outside interests. They aren't allowed to have anything that is theirs alone or sets them apart from the herd. Any deviation from the norm is dangerous because it could promote critical thinking and lead to rebellion.

David looks like he's developing a pot belly in that photo, but I think it's really just a badly-fitting vest. And Priscilla must be wearing the ubiquitous Gothardite flip-flops, but with that floor-length skirt she looks like she's barefoot.

I think it's very likely that Josh will really start packing on the pounds now. It's always seemed that junk food has been his stress reliever and now, with his life in shambles, he'll be self-medicating with burgers, pizza and ice cream the way a non-fundy guy in his position might start hitting the bottle. I'd be willing to bet that Josh was much more concerned with getting as much cash as he could out of the FRC, rather than carrying his benefits through the baby's birth. After all, everything turned out fine with the first three births, so why worry? And if something does go wrong, the Lord will take care of them. Ha, love it! Too bad she's never been allowed to watch the episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents where the demure little housewife bashes her husband's head in with a frozen leg of lamb and then cooks and serves it to the detectives investigating his murder.

Skatelady, this is the first explanation of Jessa and Ben's interest in adoption that makes any sense. Not sense to a normal person, of course, but sense in an "I can totally see them doing that" kind of way.

Do you have any idea how many couples got divorced in the Sixties because the husband watched The Andy Griffith Show and was defrauded by Helen Crump? The only Godly thing about that show was Aunt Bee...a middle-aged woman who had no father or husband and who therefore lived under the headship of her nephew, raising his kid and doing his laundry. She's a good role model for Jana.

Most of the older kids posted "Happy Father's Day" IG or YouTube messages to Jim Bob. They were all very scripted and rehearsed, obviously written by Jim Bob and Michelle, and clearly intended as a coordinated PR move. Josh and Anna's YouTube video was particularly repulsive (there's a link to it in the Josh and Anna thread). They're so badly done that I doubt they'll win the Duggars any new support, but the leghumpers will love them.

I think you're absolutely right. I've heard a few people say "Well, what about Woody Allen and Roman Polanski? They've been forgiven and America has embraced them again." Well, no. A lot of people haven't re-embraced them (including me), but even among those who have, there's really no comparison to Josh Duggar. Allan and Polanski have been able to continue their careers because they had successful careers to begin with. They make movies that garner critical praise, win awards and that audiences want to see. Even if you loathe them, you can understand why they haven't become complete pariahs. Josh has no previous successes, no reservoir of achievement to draw upon. He's an uneducated, inarticulate man with a pompous, unattractive personality and no marketable skills. All he has on his resume is that he was the spokesman for the FRC and he certainly can't return to attacking other people for their lack of "family values" without having his own can of worms opened. There's no reason for anyone to want him back. As for Jim Bob and Michelle... And this is the best argument for putting them back on the air. Let the ratings dwindle until TLC cancels them due to lack of interest, which I'll bet will happen a lot faster than most people think. At least then, they won't be able to credibly claim that they're being persecuted for their Christian faith.

While that's certainly true, I don't think it even occurred to the girls that they COULD say "no" to the interview. From birth, they've been trained to unquestioning obedience to their parents and I don't think marriage or legal adulthood has changed that in the slightest. Daddy's word is law. First he hides behind his sisters and now he hides behind his kids.

June might conceivably have one or two low-level TLC employees that she keeps in touch with, but I can't believe anybody with any real clout (or anybody that cared about their jobs) would return her phone calls. But she's so desperate for attention these days that she'll do or say anything if it might get her back on camera or in a tabloid for a second. The "unfairness" of it all must be killing her.

Or maybe Jill gets along better with Derick than Jessa does with Ben. It's possible that Jessa hangs out at the TTH a lot because she's decided that she doesn't like Ben as much as she thought she would.

If Derick did get fired, it's going to be hard to claim that Walmart is persecuting him for his Christian beliefs.

If Ivy's smart, she'll bypass Liam and get Wyatt to marry her. Once she's married to his brother and unavailable. Liam will suddenly discover that he loves her with the passion of a thousand burning nuns. Steffy who?

TLC basically has two options at this point: get rid of the Duggars entirely and get some credit for (belatedly) taking the same stand against child molestation that they took with "Here Comes Honey Boo Boo or give the Dillards and Seewalds their own spin-off and then cancel it after it crashes and burns within one season (because without the Jim Bob/Michelle/Gothard freak show aspect, the daughters and their husbands just aren't interesting enough to keep the audience engaged after the first few episodes).