Welcome Home, Martha

Martha Stewart may be the most polarizing figure of our time whose name is not George Walker Bush. Either you loved her or you hated her.

I always fell into the latter category. The last thing I, a mediocre housekeeper at best, wanted to hear was some multikazillionaire telling me to grow my own herbs. I remember channel surfing once and watching an astounded Julia Child asking Martha Stewart in that wonderful, affable deadpan she had, whether painting a blush on handmade marzipan cherries was really worth the trouble.

When faced with a choice between dusting or going to the movies, the movie always wins out. Life is just too damn short to spend all your leisure time cleaning.

Martha Stewart was the original patron saint of the kind of overstressed supermoms who were the subject of a recent Newsweek article. Yeah, just what we need. More pressure.

But when Martha Stewart was convicted of refusing to acknowledge guilt in the timing of her sale of ImClone stock, at a time when Kenny-Boy Lay, Bernie Ebbers, Scott Sullivan, and the rest of the corporate crooks who caused hundreds of thousands of people to lose all of their retirement money, and in many cases, their jobs, it became clear that this was a Federal witch hunt against a relatively small player who just happened to be a Democrat....sort of like impeaching a Democratic president for a blowjob while a Republican president gets a free pass for lying to the American people to justify a war.

So today Martha Stewart goes home, and this former Martha-hater is cheering. I'm not the only one, either. Shares of Martha Stewart Omnimedia have been rallying of late, and rather than being a pariah, she will go back to running the company after her release from home confinement, AND she'll get her own version of The Apprentice. And there are a bunch of people like me, former Martha-haters, who are now cheering, "You go, girl!"

Dorothy Parker was right. Living well truly IS the best revenge.