Well, in the not really news department, Senator Specter of Pennsylvania has officially left the Republican Party and joined the Democratic Party, an act somewhat akin to a man marrying his long-time mistress after his long-suffering wife finally divorces him. I hope the change makes the good Senator happy, although I suspect it will negatively impact his newsworthiness. As a Republican In Name Only, the news media could always go to him for a sound bite criticizing the positions of the party he ostensibly belonged to, which sound bite would then be bandied about on the Sunday morning pundit parades as evidence of dissension in the Republican ranks. Now, I fear, Senator Specter is just one more Democratic pol spouting the nonsense one usually expects to hear from Democratic pols and so the media will have to go to someone else for their news of Republican dissension. They’ll find someone to take over Sen. Specter’s role as Republican nonconformist soon enough, I think.

RACISM REARS ITS UGLY HEAD: I am a racist. Yes, I am. I know this particularly unsavory fact about myself because Janeane Garofalo says so. Ms. Garofalo comes to us from the morally and psychically elevated plane of Hollywood, whose denizens can spot the lurking shadow of racism in a linen closet full of white sheets. So, I am a racist, as are the tens of thousands of people who either went to last week’s tea parties or supported the demonstrators’ aims. This, I think, is always a good thing to know about yourself, even if the sight of an affluent white woman playing the race card seems a bit cognitively dissonant at first; I will have to get over this. It seems that I am a racist because I object to the former senator from Illinois’ plan to spend the nation into bankruptcy. You wouldn’t think that fiscal policy could support a charge of racism; spending money you don’t have seems fairly color blind to me; but you’d be wrong there. Ms. Garofalo knows better and we must all defer to her superior wisdom. In fact, non-supporters of the distinguished gentleman from Illinois should simply stop spewing our racist hate altogether and be still while our betters decide what’s best for us. I was a bit nonplussed at this; I was under the impression that petitioning the government for a redress of grievances was in the Constitution somewhere and that dissent was the highest form of patriotism, but I guess I was wrong about that.

GOVERNMENT CARS: I haven’t been keeping up with the news recently; some things are just too depressing for words and I’ve been trying to shift from my usual diet of negativity to something with fewer carbohydrates and more good cholesterol; so I’ve been missing things as they go zipping by, and one of the things that I’ve apparently missed is the United States government guaranteeing the warranties of the Big Three automakers. This was news to me, and apparently it was news to me about three weeks after it was news to everyone else here in this our Great Republic. Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I should point out that my car is nine years old and that I finished making payments on it four or five years ago, so I am pretty sure that the warranty on my car ran out a while ago and that President Obama’s guarantee does not effect me in any way, which means that I am now officially easy meat for Lennie, my trusty and extremely expensive auto mechanic and a man whose kids my car has put through college at least twice. Having said that, I would think that people whose cars are still under warranty would start to worry right about now. At first glance, the idea that the full faith and credit of the United States government backs your car warranty should ease the fears of anyone with a warrantied car, but should reflection set in, and reflection almost always sets in like your brother in law from New Jersey parking his fat ass in your favorite chair after Thanksgiving dinner, troubles innumerable begin to spring up. I hesitate to point this out, a grammatical construction I’ve never really understood, since what usually follows after you say that you hesitate to point this out is the very thing you say you are hesitating to point out, but the same government that says it will guarantee your warranty is the same government that cannot successfully run a railroad, deliver your mail, or patrol its own borders. This, you’ll pardon me for saying so, does not inspire confidence in the long-term security of your warranty. So if you do have a government-backed auto warranty, you might want to start thinking about trading your car in for a Japanese or German car. If you are ecologically minded and concerned that getting a new foreign car may add to your carbon imprint, then now is a good time to think about buying a bicycle, or maybe a horse, although parking for the latter may be a bit hard to come by these days. And remember, if the government wants to guarantee the warranty on your horse, you might as well shoot it right now; five will get you ten the horse will be lame by the end of the year. And don’t forget to recycle the shoes.

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PUFFING THE KERFUFFLE: You may not have noticed this, but those of us who live here in this our Great Republic are very fond of kerfuffles. Yes sirree, if there’s anything we love more than Mom, apple pie, and Chevrolet, and if you actually remember that commercial you’re a lot older than you’re telling people you are, it’s a good kerfuffle. Why, only last week, so it was, there was a wonderful kerfuffle in Washington, DC, and if my guess is right, this is not the last kerfuffle we’ll see from this Administration before it kershuffles off this mortal coil. Now, kerfuffle, for those of you who don’t already know, is a geological term, like butte or monadnock, denoting a mountain that last week was something a little less than a molehill. These sudden mountains occur from time to time; in Mexico, for example, Paricutin began life in 1943 as a smoking hole in the middle of a cornfield and by the end of the year the mountain was over a thousand feet tall and still belching smoke and fire like my Uncle Tommy a couple of hours after he’s finished eating his sixth slice of pepperoni and sausage pizza. Both eruptions are and were amazing sights, I’m sure.

Kerfuffles operate in a similar manner, except they are much more common and even more annoying, if such a thing is possible. And kerfuffles tend to build faster than volcanoes, even a relatively speedy one like Paricutin. Kerfuffles also tend to occur in some places more than others. Hollywood, California, and Washington, D.C., to take just two examples, are famous for the size and speed of their kerfuffles. Only last week, for instance, the thunderous sound of yet another kerfuffle slouching towards the television cameras to be born rocked official Washington, whereas unofficial Washington was unmoved. The source of the kerfuffle was, if the press reports are correct, the former junior Senator from Illinois, who decided, for reasons that seem pretty flimsy to me, but then, no one asked me for my opinion, to hold a press conference.

I do not know why he chose to do this; speaking to the White House press corps always seems a losing proposition to me; it detracts them from their primary function, which is taking dictation, and gives them ideas above their station in life. Trying to be reasonable with a group of egomaniacal clods huffed out of their minds on hair spray is never a winning proposition for the politician who attempts it and any pol who does attempt it deserves the pounding he will get. I did not see this press conference myself—I try to avoid looking at politicians when it isn’t an election year, as the exercise often makes me nauseous and despair of constitutional republicanism as a valid form of self-government—but apparently, the former junior Senator from Illinois brought his trusty teleprompter with him to the press conference.

This simple act sparked last week’s outbreak of kerfuffledom, although I am not sure why this is so. That the distinguished gentleman from Illinois is an excellent orator is one of the great political truths of our time; that he tends to put in his mouth whenever he is not delivering a prepared text was one of the lesser known political truths of our time, or it was, until he chose to put his foot in his mouth in front of several million Tonight Show viewers. So, seeking the comfort of the familiar, he brought a teleprompter to a press conference.

The kerfuffle that arose over this simple piece of machinery went up faster than a mob of Amish guys on meth can put up a barn. Opinions flowed from one end of the political spectrum and out the other like green beer on St. Patrick’s Day, and yet the question remains, why should this be so? Surely, if the distinguished gentleman from Illinois finds having a teleprompter in the room comforting than no one could begrudge him that.

No one, I think, would criticize President Linus Van Pelt if he brought his trusty blanket with him to a press conference. Throughout history, great political leaders have brought their personal talismans with them into the great hurly-burly of political life. The French Revolutionary leader, Georges Danton, always brought his pet gerbil, Etienne, with him to meetings of the French National Assembly for good luck; when his enemy Robespierre had Danton guillotined in 1794, Robespierre fed Etienne to his cat, also named Etienne. While the latter Etienne no doubt enjoyed the former, the act did neither Robespierre nor the feline Etienne any good; Robespierre’s enemies sent him to the guillotine a few months after Danton, and they beheaded the cat too, not for any crime against the Republic, but because several members of the National Assembly were allergic to cat dander and wanted to stop sneezing. Eighty years earlier and at the other end of Europe, Sweden’s Charles XII, a young man with an extremely inflated idea of the capabilities of the Swedish Army and a very bad map of Europe, invaded Russia while sitting on a barrel of pickled herring. The thought of pickled herring made him happy, the King wrote in his largely apocryphal memoirs, and he wanted to make sure that he got his fair share of them when his cook, an untrustworthy sort last seen chasing a sock chicken, opened the barrel. Charles may have lost the Battle of Poltava to Peter the Great, but he did make it out of Russia with his barrel of pickled herring intact, although he did have to concede the area Saint Petersburg now stands on to do so. And the historical examples go on and on.

In the end, however, we must ask why kerfuffles should exist at all, but this, I think, is less a political question than a question of moral philosophy, something akin to what is the meaning of life or why a duck? Clearly, a 24/7 news cycle, a cycle that demands that something, anything, gets put on the air no matter how idiotic it might be has something to do with this; the utterly dubious careers of Paris Hilton and her ilk are hardly explainable otherwise; and I suppose that advertisers must love kerfuffles—they drive ratings up, and what advertiser doesn’t like higher ratings? This, I shouldn’t need to explain, is a purely rhetorical question. If you did feel the need to answer this question, please lay down on a comfortable sofa with a cold compress on your forehead and wait for the need to pass. Take some aspirin too, if you have them. All kidding aside, this will make you feel better and will help prevent heart attacks. It will also remind you not to answer rhetorical questions or to raise kerfuffles for fun and profit in your own home, thereby mixing our poor kerfuffle’s metaphors completely. In any case, the only real good thing about kerfuffles is the way they disappear. Unlike Paricutin, which is still sitting there in Mexico being a volcano, I’m pretty sure that no one even remembers last week’s kerfuffle at all. That’s because everyone is waiting for this week’s kerfuffle to start up. Yes sirree, every day’s a kerfuffling adventure here in this our Great Republic, yes it is.