"he must be high on something," someone said

Yesterday our illustrious senator Charlie Shroomer, shown here preparing to examine a witness, ate a buncha shrooms and then had hard words for the popular Russian dictator, Vlad the Inhaler, re: the latter's date with Edward Snowden.

"If you do this there will be serious consequences!" the indignant legislator growled with a growl.

But despite the threats of Sen Shroomer, or the shrieks of Sen Huckleberry Graham, or the towelmouthed mumblings of Mike Lee, the senator from Toxic Waste, the czar of all the Russias was not seen shakin like a dog shittin peach pits. In fact, he didn't even seem to notice.

Why should he? Putin is the immensely popular, democratically elected dictator of the biggest oil producing country in the world. He's in the catbird seat, while the United States is in deep kim chee, over money, endless war, accelerating inequality, Stalinist surveillance, and on and on.

Meanwhile in Russia, life is good. The money from western Europe to pay the bill for all that Russian oil and gas keeps rolling in, and it's party time. Putin doesn't have to deal with a crackbrained legislature trying to starve poor people, or idiotic arguments over abortion, guns, Terry Schaivo, the flag, and praiyer in our skewels. At the same time the material underpinnings of life in the US are strained to the breaking point, and the future here is very uncertain.

This is an astounding reversal of historical fortune. The Russians have suffered more than perhaps any other people on earth, having endured autocracy, Bolshevism, the worst war ever visited on any country in history, followed by a bloody repression which likewise set world records. But he who is last shall later be first, and vice versa, and as the great Yogi Berra once said, "History ain't what it used to be."

Have another helping of mushrooms, Chuck. Lindsey Graham is about to turn his underwear around backward and give a stern if somewhat falsetto lecture to Vladimir the Czar, who has recently gone Czarinaless. No matter, this veck will never truly be on his oddy knocky, for he has a high functioning gulliver on his pletchoes, and therefore need not deign to slooshy the grazhny slovos of bezoomy shroomer, nor the creechy goloss of Sen Huckleberry.