The Handmaidens Tale: The Theocratic Patriarchy is HereDeep inside the bowels of the Democratic Party there must be what an online friend Miss Marple calls the Department of Scary Stories. This mysterious department regularly turns out tales designed to frighten (often successfully) the more credulous. When Mitt Romney ran for president the most ludicrous of these was that he would ban tampons, a bit of nonsense that I saw was credited as the truth by many.