Squirrel hunting in Washington

Hi Chuck, I'm Brett and this here’s my pal, Neil, and we just come back from the woods out there in Maryland where we was a-shootin' them damn squirrels morning, noon, and night, and we want you to know that we heard your speech the other day and we thought it was a humdinger, you betcha! Why, I don't think I ever heard such a good speech before, no sirree Bob! The thing of it is, though, Chuck, me and Neil was wondering about this here price you was saying we was gonna have to pay. Now, we cracked out our copies of the Constitution and checked up on Article III (the three iii's, well, that's them ancient Romans' way of saying 3, which is understandable, not like V being their way of saying five. Nothing about a V says five to me, but I may just be missing something here) and right there in Article III it says that we get keep our jobs just so long as we behave ourselves and don't get drunk on a Saturday night and go shooting out the lights in front of the Capitol. It'll be a bit of a strain, but I think we can manage that. There ain’t hardly no point to wasting ammunition like that, anyways. So we're not too worried about the price we'll have to pay for getting crossways of you. After all, Chuck, we're both younger than you and we will, in all probability, still have a job here in Washington when you are dead and gone. Remember, Chuckles, we don't gotta run for nothing no more. So, we’ll be seeing you around and, just remember, stay away from them there squirrels!

Pot shot

"We cannot mistake absolutism for principle, or substitute spectacle for politics, or treat name-calling as reasoned debate.." The former junior senator from Illinois, bloviating on January 21.

Why not, I wonder?  He does it all the time and he seems to be doing quite well with the strategy, unless, of course, this is not a strategy but rather an example of what the psychologists call projection, wherein one imputes one's own faults and shortcomings on to someone else. In either case, it hardly seems fair that He gets to project stuff and the GOP does not, and since fairness is the great mantra of the Illinois Messiah and His minions one would expect that conservatives would sue this maladministration for violating our equal protection rights under the 14th Amendment. I don't think it will happen, though; the trial lawyers are on His side. Such is life, I fear.

STATE OF THE UNION: I didn’t watch the State of the Union speech, although I suppose I should have—it’s part of my civic obligation as an American citizen, after all, just like jury duty or betting on the Lotto and so doing my part to educate the uneducable little wretches that daily infest school buildings from one end of this our Great Republic to the other—but if I want to watch someone spout non sequiturs I’ll watch Chico Marx; he’s funnier than the former junior senator from Illinois and his non sequiturs don’t cost as much. The real reason I didn’t watch the State of the Union, however, is that Miss Nancy is no longer the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Mr. Boehner may be a very emotional guy with tear ducts that could sink the Titanic in twenty minutes and the Andrea Doria in half an hour, but he’s not going to jump to his feet every ten seconds the way Miss Nancy did. Watching Miss Nancy doing her imitation of a Jack LaLanne in the Box was always the highlight of the State of the Union speech, because when she leapt up to applaud the former senator’s vapid blatherings, and she would leap up at the drop of a semicolon, all the other Democrats in the chamber had to get to their feet as well, and watching some of those guys trying to get to their feet was morbidly fascinating, in much the same way as waiting for cars to crash at the Daytona 500 is morbidly fascinating.

And no Democratic member of the House could refuse to get up or even hand in a letter from their mother saying they couldn’t stand up because the family doctor said so; no, indeed, Miss Nancy stood watching the members with her chemically enhanced Gorgon glare for any sign of weakness, compromise, second thoughts or, horrors of horrors, moderation and bipartisanship. There would be none of that in Miss Nancy’s House, no sirreee, not if some old-timer wanted to keep his committee chairmanship and thus his personal fiefdom over some small portion of the federal bureaucracy. So the Democratic bulls got up every time Miss Nancy did, whether they wanted to or not, and the viewer at home sat and watched and maybe even took bets on whether or not some of these guys would keel over from all the unexpected exercise or, pushed to the edge at last, join the Republicans in order to stay in their seats.

Of course, had these Democrats crossed the aisle and joined the Republicans they would still have seats to stay in, and now that they are gone and Miss Nancy isn’t Speaker anymore she can use all her newly acquired spare time to step in and take over the late Jack LaLanne’s role as America’s dean of exercise gurus. I’d bet someone as enthusiastic as she is could sell a lot of Jack LaLanne’s juicers on the cable channels; maybe she can even get everyone in this our Great Republic a juicer as part of the former junior senator’s health care reform, that and a DVD giving the recipient instructions on the proper way to do a jumping jack. I know that I wouldn’t mind getting a free juicer at taxpayer’s expense, except that I am one of those taxpayers and I don’t want a juicer and I really don’t want to do jumping jacks. I’m not really a big juice person; juice usually doesn’t have caffeine in it and I more or less insist on there being caffeine in what I drink. And bubbles; I like carbonation a lot too.

POST NUMBER 800, IF YOU CAN BELIEVE IT: I don’t, as a rule, watch political speeches; if I must pay attention to such things, I prefer to read them in the paper, where the arguments the bloviating pol is making must stand or fall on their merits without the assistance of all the tricks of the rhetorical trade. But I did see the former junior Senator for Illinois’ speech about health care the other day. It was not a terribly interesting speech—just the usual lame rubbish that would insult the intelligence of a dyslexic duck if dyslexic ducks cared about human health care one way or the other—but what I found truly fascinating was Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s attempt to conduct an aerobics class while the ex-Senator was trying to give his speech and how no one in the mainstream media bothered to report her obstreperous behavior.

No, everyone concentrated on that congressman who yelled, “You lie,” when the former distinguished gentleman from Illinois did, in fact, lay a whopper on the listening public, but mum’s the word about Nancy’s gymnastics class, even though at one point our leader unsuccessfully tried to talk right through one particularly vigorous set of squat thrusts. While I think that it is a good thing that Ms. Pelosi wants to keep the legislative branch slim, trim, and in good health for the legislative battles ahead, and as much as I think some of the people’s tribunes could stand a good workout every now and again, there is a time and a place for everything and I think it behooves Ms. Pelosi to restrict her congressional exercise regimen to the odd morning in the Congressional gym. She is not Jack LaLanne, after all, and I think that such floor exercises are unseemly on national television and only aggravate 1.) the viewing public, who know that the guest of honor is pissing on their legs and telling them it’s raining, and think that solonic aerobics is a damn poor way of distracting their attention, however entertaining watching John Murtha exercise something other than his pork barrel may be, 2.) television executives, who, no matter how much they may love the current Administration, hate losing advertising revenue even more, and 3.) the Vice President of the United States, who looked like he wanted to bludgeon Ms. Pelosi to within an inch of her life with a gavel if she insisted on performing her impression of Jack-in-the-Congress one more time.

It’s just my opinion, of course, but I think the Veep may be on to something there. I’m pretty sure he could get some excellent ratings on Fox or CNN or even MSNBC if he bopped the Speaker over the head with the Speaker’s gavel (the Speaker, for those of you who don’t already know this, gets an actual gavel to do her job with, whereas the Vice President gets the end off an old shaving brush to call his house to order, on the purely specious grounds that the Senate is a more rarified crew of nitwits than the House of Representatives is and therefore it doesn’t take as much noise to get their attention). If he proved reasonably proficient at it, the E Network or MTV might even offer him a reality show in which the Vice President traveled from one end of this our Great Republic whacking deserving political figures over the head. There is no end to the stream of political cockroaches he could stamp on here in the Vampire State, something that would keep the show on the air and flush with ratings for years to come.