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Candor Alert: This was going to be the beginning of today's Mullings:
To: The Discovery Channel
Re: New Series Idea
Sirs:
Your very excellent series "When Dinosaurs Roamed America" has changed the way many viewers think about these animals who, in their day, ruled their environment.
I would like to propose a new series, "When Dinosaurs Roamed the Senate."
Then I compared various Democratic Senators to specific dinosaurs, and it was going to be Hilarity on a Grand Scale.
After I wrote it, even I didn't think it was very funny.
It was too hard to describe these guys in Paleolithic terms without sinking into the rhetorical tar pits of physical appearance humor (although the riff comparing Ted Kennedy to a dinosaur who went extinct after he woke up one morning to find he had eaten everything, everywhere and thought the asteroid hitting the earth was the start of the "Barbeque 'n Babes Bash" in Cancun, Mexico WAS pretty amusing).
So, let us - as my guidance counselor said to me at the beginning of each and every one of the eight semesters of my high school career - begin anew:
The face of the National Democratic Party is not Al Gore, or Tom Daschle, or Joe Lieberman, or John Edwards, or Dick Gephardt. It is Robert Byrd.
Can you imagine if Robert Byrd were a Republican and was the best the GOP had to offer?
If Byrd were a Republican, his nearly incomprehensible rants on the floor about the Iraqi Resolution would already have sent Dan Rather to the Home for the Permanently Rapturous having held Byrd up to well-deserved scorn at the top of his CBS newscast each night.
If Byrd were a Republican, his use of the "N" word on Fox last year would be referenced in every single piece, by every single reporter, every single time his name came up.
His weird rhetoric - now HERE's something interesting: I watched Byrd on the tube describing the "whereas" clauses in the Iraqi Resolution as being "pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty ..." I believe I counted seven "pretties."
However the official transcript of floor proceedings of the U.S. Senate - The Congressional Record - has the following:
"Why don't we just [put up an 'out of business sign' over the Capitol], instead of going through this kind of blank check, and covering it over with fig leaves and 'whereases' that are flowery - flowery - beautiful? Oh, they are pretty fig leaves, they are pretty 'whereases.'
I guess Byrd's staff thought that one pretty was pretty much enough.
Not only that, but Byrd was in a lather about a Resolution which wasn't even up for discussion. Senator John Warner, of Virginia pointed this out to him, saying, "I thank my colleague ... for recognizing [that] what he was reading from previously, is separate from the resolution which I coauthored with Senator Lieberman."
Which is Senate-speak for: "You old coot, you don't even know what we're supposed to be debating here."
The entire give-and-take between Warner and Byrd - which makes for fascinating reading - is on the Secret Decoder Ring page today.
Here's my suggestion du jour for every Republican running for Congress: Demand that your opponent have the House Ethics Committee investigate Jim McDermott's (D-WA) activities in, and statements from Iraq.
If your opponent refuses, ask him if he intends to talk to McDermott about it, or send him a note about it, or in ANY way demonstrate any displeasure whatsoever with McDermott's statement that President Bush would "mislead the American people" but we should "take Saddam Hussein at his word."
And if your opponent DOES say he will take some action, ask him if he intends to do it before the House adjourns next week, and if he will issue a press release describing what that action was.
On the Secret Decoder Ring page today: The official transcript of the Byrd-Warner dust-up on the Senate floor, a link to Byrd's official U.S. Senate web page, and a NEW FEATURE: The Mullfoto of the Day!
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