Big Blog Attack

Amazing Grease

Dennis Perrin, the former comedy-writer, now a professional fire-eating radical and author of the anti-Democratic-Party broadside "Savage Mules," writes of sitting at a red light in his home state of Michigan a couple days ago with a lone driver in the lane next to his who appeared about ready to pee his pants.

He's heavy-set, balding, wearing a teal shirt and loosened dark tie. His big hairy hands are pounding the wheel. He's looking back and forth, as if seeking an opening. The light remains red. Finally, he can't take it anymore, hits the gas and runs the light. A couple of cars stop and honk, but the guy flies past them. Maybe he's having a heart attack, I thought, or has to use the can. A minute or so after this, the light is green, and I push ahead, Zeppelin's "Rock and Roll" shaking my dash. I must have been going faster than I thought, for suddenly the guy's car is just ahead of me. He slows, flips his left turn signal, then pulls into a McDonald's drive-through.

I'm sure Dennis remembers, as I do, that back in the 70's that was called a "Big Mac Attack."

Two-Dimensional Candidate

Meanwhile, everybody's favorite political cartoonist, Tom Tomorrow (Okay, so he's not Assrocket's favorite cartoonist) is at the awesome and very unique Democratic convention in Denver, where he has posted a picture of himself posing with Barack Obama, or a reasonable facsimile thereof.

Senator Benzadrina

Writing at Jonathan Schwarz's blog, "Tiny Revolution" the mathematician Bernard Chazelle exhibits the same disdain for the Democrats' pick for the VP spot as seems to infect radical extreme left-wing anti-war pacifist terrorist sympathizers all over the flippin' net. So the guy voted "Aye" on Bush's war resolution five years ago. Can't an honest legislator make an honest mistake once in a while?

Like Jonathan, I am having trouble containing my excitement about Joe Biden. I heard on NPR that, unlike Obama, Biden knows where the bathrooms are in the White House.

That's very exciting news. But... how would NPR know? Did Neal Conan or Robert Siegel actually ask Biden to count, locate, and describe the White House urinals? Did they ask him whether he made use of the facilities and, if so, why? If the president calls you into his office to share with you his latest plan to carpet-bomb a poor Muslim country, do you go "Hold that B-52 thought just a sec, Mr President, where's the restroom?" Wouldn't that say something significant about your ability to lead? If you can't plan ahead to use the bathroom before meeting the president, why should I believe you can plan the reconstruction of a nation after you've annihilated it? I read that Napoleon lost at Waterloo because he had a bad case of hemorrhoids (think about it: if not for hemorrhoids, you'd all be speaking French.) A politician's intimate knowledge of White House plumbing should be cause for worry not reassurance. Trust NPR to miss that.

If you think my fears are ill-founded, check this out.

Six months before the invasion of Iraq, four US senators asked the CIA to produce a National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's WMDs. Ten days after the report came out, Biden joined the majority of the Senate in authorizing war.

Biden read the report and saw immediately that the White House was peddling major-league crapola.

"I did read it, and that's why I took issue from the very beginning, as you'll recall, from the very beginning, saying that what they were saying was not accurate."

So, what ya gonna do when you're a legislator who realizes the executive is feeding you a line of bullshit? You give 'em what they want anyway, if you value your status and rank in the D.C. pecking order.

Chazelle doesn't say this, but I will: Biden's hypocrisy isn't entirely his fault; it simply shows what's happened to the checks-and-balances form of government that's described in that archaic document, the U.S. Constitution.

If you want to play ball in that town, you got to defer to the real power, or get left on the bench.

That's just one of the reasons I have almost no interest in politics this political season. I find political activity in the U.S. as it's presently incarnated, and in other countries with similar forms of government such as, for example, El Salvador, profoundly uninteresting.