Concerning John's one real advantage over Elly.

As you know, I don't think that Elly really has all that good a public image because to this day, she's probably known as "the angry, ill-informed idiot who protested the arena expansion for the specious reason that she took something as an attack on her person and who is personally responsible for delaying a necessary upgrade for decades." It bothers her that the general public regards her as being a fractious, ignorant imbecile screaming about nothing and ruining things for everyone because she gets enough of that noise out of her own family.

What bothers her more is that John is the same sort of short-tempered, short-sighted, pig-ignorant and easily-offended nincompoop she is and is as likely to fly off his handle and go on a rampage of complete and utter stupidity as she is but the public seems to love him and think of him as a figure of dignity, intelligence and respect. Leaving aside the innate advantage he has of being a white man and thus being given more of the benefit of the doubt than he actually deserves, it seems to me that John is superior to Elly in one respect that makes all the difference: he's a better bullshit artist.

Granted, he doesn't have Jean fooled for a second because she sees through the public image of the heroic dentist and long-suffering husband to see the apathetic borderline-incompetent dentist and entitled churl we see but it's fairly obvious that the general public regards John as a figure of gravitas, sobriety and respect. This is because he knows what words to say, when to say them and (most importantly) when to keep his fat yap shut. He never seems to have mastered that skill with his own family with the result that they see him as either a ghost or a vaguely looming menace that they don't want to rile up but, as I said, clods like Gordon and Anthony see him as a role model because they don't see past the surface.

Not-Fred, Ted, Not-not-June, Connie and Irene: a field study in faulty logic.

The current unsightly mess in which Elly got all defensive about how she was in the right to make a huge jerk of herself by casually informing Irene that she was the other woman reminds me of another idiotic catastrophe in which her inability to mind her own business and faulty grasp on logic made her make a fool of herself. Said mess was the incident in which she mistakenly believed that an acquaintance's husband was stepping out on her with some hussy; as we know, it turned out that she stormed up to their table only to find that it wasn't the man she thought he was at all. In both cases, Elly made the foolish mistake of assuming that it's her job to barge right on in and put a stop to things and in both cases, it was the most stupid thing she could have done.

This is because she seems to be incapable of realizing that her assumption that if she catches a man doing something, he'll be so embarrassed, he'll HAVE to do right by his wife and never stray again is, well, stupid and wrong. All parading down Main Street bellowing about how yessir, she'd put a stop to something would have done is to make her look like a nosy fool who made the friend she thought she was helping feel betrayed and hurt. What's more, she'd take out her anger not on the husband who did it but on the meddling imbecile who witlessly destroyed a cozy little illusion.

She also doesn't seem to want to accept the fact that said exposed husband would simply have to find a better way to hide the impulse towards polygamy that drives him; Annie's casual revelation that she'd pretty much turned herself into Batman in order to keep Steve from straying might have surprised Elly but it doesn't shock me overly much. This is because I remember all the strips that had Ted get either dismissive or defensive when John told him that he was headed for a fall or become The Amazing Buckpasser when he did crash and burn.

Finally, she seems to be burdened with the insane assumption that impotence means assent. As I've said before, she thinks that a whole town loves adultery because they're paralyzed into inaction by a situation that they don't like but can't do anything about without making things worse. This last peculiarity seems to be why she has such a hard time learning from her mistakes. Simply put, she thinks that she matters more than she actually does and it tends to screw up her life a whole lot.