As python 2.6 was already commented as a potential environment, there seemed little
reason to not use Argparse rather than a sys.argv popping system; argparse offers
automatically generated usage documentation and can offer useful errors when input
is incorrect.
The "with" context statement is also highly excellent and should be used wherever
legacy support for old-timers using 2.6 is not needed.
Also cleaned up some flakes noticed by pyflakes, and make the scrub() be @classmethod instead of @staticmethod so I could use the class for the verbose output.
caveats:
* there are no unit tests of this patch
* now your logs of your stderr have potentially sensitive information in them
* the implementation of arg parsing is very low-tech; (a *good* way to do arg parsing is the "argparse" module)