New Orleans There’s not a whole lot to like about Rupert Murdoch, though I have to respect the fact that he has unquestionably built a media empire by hook or by crook.  He testified before Parliament in London yesterday claiming his ignorance of gross misbehavior by subordinates involved in the phone hacking scandal in the UK and pretty much throwing all of them under the bus, saying essentially, if they muffed up, it was on them.  There was not much I could learn about Murdoch and how he operates from this testimony.
Really only one thing became clearer to those of us watching all of this political and press drama from the cheap seats:  we now finally get it about his third wife, Wendi Deng Murdoch!
One is always supposed to raise an eyebrow at the trophy wife cliché of the rich and snort about the almost 40 year age difference, the two new children, and the unmentioned get-rich-quick, stay-young-while-dying alliance that is the presumed background story of these affairs, but now we suddenly find out there is a new narrative at work.  Turns out he needed what we call here in this city and some places in this country, a “ride and die chick.”  Somehow the old somuvabitch must have sensed he needed something different.  He needed a real bodyguard by his side, a tiger-wife so to speak.

In a weird UK protest tradition there was an effort by a local comedian to put a pie pan full of shaving cream in the dude’s face while he was at the microphone being grilled by the parliamentarians.

[England! What a country?  There is so little security that a bloke can break out of audience with a pie plate and take a run at a speaker before an august committee without so much as a “howdy do.”  I knew they the bobbies didn’t wear guns over there, but I’m fascinated to know how loosey-goosey they are about even low level security. Maybe that’s why previous to this current scandal that the New Corporation has so many of the Scotland Yard cops on the tab, just to get a little police protection.  Now that they can’t payoff, it’s hell’s to pay!] Before the fella can get to Rupert, Wendi is up like a shot, pink jacket and all, and swinging a roundhouse left hook and striking the guy. Wendi, faster than a speeding bullet, being a ride and die chick, was all over the guy like a cheap suit, leaving the police pretender late to the scene, it seems now perhaps to save the protestor, known in the UK as Jonnie Marbles.  [God, I love this story!]

Wendi is absolutely a ride or die chick all the way.  Marbles is lucky he’s alive.  We see this thing every day but usually not in uppity nose London in Parliament with billionaires in the dock.

Loving it!
There’s maybe even more.  The notoriously unreliable British press also suggests that after Wendi administered the beatdown while protecting the elderly hubby, she then “picked up the paper plate from the witness table and shoved it into the protestor’s face, screaming as she did.”  The New York Times confirmed that Marbles was “led away by the police with his face covered in white cream.”  Payback, is sweet, eh, girl?
So who knows how this phone jacking and hacking deal will play out, but one thing is now clear to me.  Once Rupert is dead and gone, one way or another, something are now certain.  Wendi, you have a place here with us in New Orleans now, home girl!