Mullings A Political Cyber Column By Rich Galen

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Every Day

Friday, June 22, 2001

From Albuquerque, New Mexico

Before we get to the continuing fallout from the Virginia 4 special election victory the other day, a few words about Cal Ripken, Jr. of the Baltimore Orioles.

Ripken announced he would be retiring at the end of this season. Ripken will be ending a career during which he broke one of the most unbelievable records in all of sport - maybe in all of everything: He played in 2,632 straight games. In sixteen seasons and never missed a game.

Goodbye Camden Yards, hello Cooperstown.

The two most valuable words in the English language might well be: Every Day.

We can all be streak hitters - rising to a challenge to get through a particularly difficult, if brief, patch. I used to say, while a guest of the U.S. Government in beautiful downtown Ft. Bragg, North Carolina that anyone can get through eight weeks of basic training. And I am the living proof that anyone can.

Parents - mothers, usually but not always - have to get the kids up, dressed, fed and out to school. Every Day.

The office, the school, the military base, the factory, the farm, the squad room, and the firehouse; or the store, the laundry, the practice, and the recital. All the places that people go rain or shine, feeling poorly or feeling fine. Every Day. Every Day. Every Day.

The people who go out and do their jobs Every Day are the ones that make it all happen. And if they do it without making a big deal about it then they reach hero status in my mind.

Unlike certain cyber-columnists who make a HUGE deal about writing a measly three columns a week and want a Presidential Medal of Freedom if that backbreaking schedule causes them to miss a Hopalong Cassidy movie.

On his display at the Baseball Hall of Fame they should engrave those two words beneath the bust of Cal Ripken: Every Day.

All right. I'm flying from Your Nation's Capital to Albuquerque yesterday (which I can now spell without going to the Internet to look it up) to do a fund raiser for Mike McEntee who is running for Mayor out here.

Because of weather-related problems I am not on Delta, I am on American; and I am not in first class I am in coach; and I am not in an aisle seat, I am next to a window on the three seat side. Every Day, something like this happens to me. Every Day!

I'm reading the Wall Street Journal and I come across the editorial entitled "Another Party Switch", and, as Howard Cosell might have called it: "There! Right There!" is my name: "Columnist Rich Galen." And the word "indicted" is nowhere around it.

John Fund, WSJ editorial page writer and professional very smart person, quoted me and the stat from Wednesday's Mullings regarding the number of times parties have switched in Congressional Special elections.

I started to poke the guy next to me and "aw shucks" it, but I couldn't find a way to work it into the conversation because we hadn't said a single word to each other for the first 90 minutes of the flight. What was I going to do, point to the paragraph then whip out my driver's license?

I wanted to get out and walk up and down the aisle and wave it at everyone, but I would have had to make the two guys outside of me get and I wanted to save that for later in the flight when I was REALLY going to need to get up.

I thought, maybe I'll show it to a flight attendant and she can have the pilot make an announcement like they do when the State-Champion-Swim-Team-From-Goliath-High-School is on board.

In the end, I took a nap.

To read the WSJ editorial, go to the Secret Decoder Ring.

A good thing, too because my friends at Salon.com (who, no matter how hard they try cannot get me to dislike Jake Trapper) took that same excellent stat and said the following:
"Cyberscribe Rich Galen does his best Ross Porter imitation, citing bizarre statistics that vaguely pertain to the race, just like the legendary Los Angeles Dodgers play-by-play man."

I have to take exception to the use of the word "vaguely." I am, however, growing partial to the word "legendary."

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