CSotD: Take a load off, Fanne, and you put the load right on we
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Joe Heller on the keen sense of priorities at work in the halls of Congress.
I don't get all the Petraeus stuff.
I mean, I get it in terms of how, when your indiscretions are this indiscreet, you can't be Head Spook anymore. What I don't get is all the piling on, and the moonbat conspiracy theories. I thought we rejected crazy-talk last Tuesday, didn't we?
Granted, the scandal itself is pretty irresistable.
When former honor students mess up, they tend to really make explosions. It's not the crime, it's the lack of cover-up.
As my white-haired mother would say, "Don't rub my nose in it." And that white hair was earned over a lifetime of things I had the good manners and common sense not to rub her nose in.
Thank goodness I didn't burden the poor woman with high expectations.
The ability of tight-asses in high places to turn a little slip from grace into a major disaster often seems odd to those of us who were C-students and (A) have been periodically messing up all our lives and (B) never felt the least sense of guilt in our youth over stopping to smell the roses or roll in them for that matter, the thorns being, to us, no more than bee stings to a honey-loving bear.
Which is, in part, "getting it out of your system" and, if not that, at least learning to exercise a little common sense before you get out into the real world where such things carry more weight.
Throwing a pair of West Point alumni into bed just seems mean.
Having the result of throwing a pair of West Point alumni into bed become the business of a collection of the sorts of National Honor Society dweebs who end up in Congress is the makings of a great comic novel, the sort of thing that Evelyn Waugh or Graham Greene might have written.
Either author would have made sure that the head of the investigating committee had a mistress on the side, preferably one with horrifyingly embarrassing connections that must never come to the surface.
Of course, you'd have to be careful not to push the absurdities too far. For instance, if one of your characters is chair of the House Ways and Means Committee, you can't have him prove he has both the ways and the means by leaping into the Tidal Pool with an Argentine stripper. Nobody would ever believe that.
And if he's a prominent senator with a clear shot at the White House, it's okay for him to have an affair, but he can't deny it and dare reporters to follow him to prove his virtue when he's already led them to her townhouse in the middle of the night.
And he sure can't be stupid enough to be photographed with her.
Readers wouldn't accept it. As has been noted several times before, the reason truth is stranger than fiction is that fiction has to make sense and the characters have to be consistent and believable.
Anyway, as Joe Heller points out, there are some other things that Congress is supposed to be addressing right now. The "fiscal cliff" was created specifically to force legislators to focus on solving the budget problems instead of pontificating, posing and prattling.
Congressman Boehner is suggesting a temporary fix and postponing the actual solution. That ought to hold the little bastards.
I don't know how much patience the American people have for the politics of distraction anymore, but if there was any takeaway from last Tuesday, it was that you can dominate chatboards and comment sections with delusional trollery, but having a majority there does not mean you have a majority in the real world.
Unless you want to get slapped down again in 2014, quit posturing for the media and get to work. There really is a Silent Majority in this country. They vote, and they're losing patience.
Speaking of "Monkey Business," here's a pair of high-school dropouts who speak for many on this matter:
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