Antics from Washington, D.C.

Occasionally I have to gird my loins and take a look under that rock known as Washington, D.C. to see what our public servants are up to. After a couple of stiff drinks, and holding a bottle of scent beneath my nose to battle the stench, I can usually take a peek without gagging. Sometimes it has a certain fascination not unlike watching torado worms bore into the hull of a ship.

Among the usual nonsense that has come from the banks of the Potomac are two items of interest.

The first concerns the agreement among the Gang of Fourteen in the back rooms of the Senate to "compromise" on the matter of filibusters to hold up the voting for President Bush's choices for the Federal bench. The Democrats do not like the appointees because, well, because they don't. The Democrats seem to be still holding their collective breaths until the populace comes to its senses after re-electing President Bush. If we're lucky the Dems will all pass out soon and the nation can get on with life without tantrums. The Republicans want an up or down vote before the full Senate concerning the judicial nominees. But strangely, despite the fact that the GOP is the majority party in the Senate, they seem to be able to get up the gumption to exercise the power they have spent so many years whining about not having.

So the Seven Dwarfs from one party got together with the Seven Sob Sisters from the other and made an agreement that is supposed to solve the impasse. The Democrats agreed to filibuster judicial nominees only in "extreme" circumstances. The document does not define the word "extreme." It looks like the Republican Senators have fallen for a game of three card monty and are smiling away as their pockets are being picked.

Once again we see some truth to the adage, "Democrats are dangerous. Republicans are useless."

Representative John Conyers has introduced a bill promoting a big Kum Ba Ya campfire singalong. He calls it an anti-intolerance bill, but a close reading of the bill shows it to be a Koran Protection Act, because the only book mentioned specifically is the Koran and the only religion mentioned is Islam. The bill, if passed, has no teeth because it's a "feel good" bill. One of those "sense of the House" type things. But it is the thin end of the wedge. Meanwhile, Mr. Conyers apparently has little regard for protecting the nation's flag from burning, supports the federal funding of such great works of art as "Piss Christ" in which a crucifix is set in a jar of urine and offers no protection for the Bible. Dhimmitude has finally come into the open in the House of Representatives.

I came across the following quotation by William Cobbett, I don't know who Mr. Cobbett is or was, but the quotation allows itself open to modern interpretation and application:

"...the difference between a resident native gentry, attached to the soil, known to every farmer and labourer from their childhood, frequently mixing with them in those pursuits where all artificial distinctions are lost, practising hospitality without ceremony, from habit and not calculation; and a gentry only now-and-then resident at all, having no relish for country delights, foreign in their manners, distant and haughty in their behaviour, looking to the soil only for its rents, viewing it as a mere object of speculation, unacquainted with its cultivators, despising them and their pursuits, and relying, for influence, not upon the good will of the vicinage, but upon the dread of their power."

When was the last you saw your assemblyman, congressman or senator in your neighborhood?

I need a drink.