The Senate and Bunning. Wild Pitch.

Let us now praise Senator Bunning. Bunning, the pitcher. Bunning, the author. Bunning, the guy who wrote a sad book. Bunning, who showed how stupid his baseball teammates and opponents were. Bunning, the U.S. Senator. Bunning, the man who now shows us what we NEED to see - how stupid his senate teammates and opponents are.

It’s not Bunning’s fault. He is probably an average man, with average intellect, and average emotional control. All he did was to show us how poorly constructed certain portions of our our constitution are, at least with respect to the Senate. Either that or he has just shown us is how badly our current senate leadership is performing.

By shutting down some portions of the legislative budget with just a simple act known as a “hold”, he has revealed how badly mistaken Joseph McCarthy was about communists and fellow travelers in the U.S. government. All the Soviet Union would ever have needed to have done to bring the United Sates to its knees in surrender was simply to get a single communist elected to our Senate. Then there would have been no more money for the military, for weapons, for Radio Free Europe, or anything. Our government would have been rendered powerless. The House of Representatives would have just sat down to wait for instructions (from the Senate). The president would have have said “Aw shucks.” as he shut down our military machine. We would have simply have just quit and let the Bolsheviks come on in. Well, apparently Bunning COULD have done that back then - eh?

OK . So now what? We have just seen senators holding up appointments, blocking laws and budget resolutions by simply saying “I forbid! (dammit!)”, as Senator DeMint of South Carolina blocked the would-have-been director of the TSA because he might lead them to form a union, and as Senator Shelby of Alabama blocked more than 300 appointees by the president in order to get a contract for a defense department airplane to be awarded to his state, and so on. Now comes Bunning, swirling around, daintily dancing and tapping his toes in a fit of pique, raising - instead of important points of order - just a finger or two. But still saying “NO!”

The American senate IS a pitiful thing. It is the greatest mistake made by our founding fathers. It is the single point that PROVES they were not led by the hand of God. This awful structure misrepresents the American people by concentrating the power of our government in the hands of only a few people, most of them prosaically rural residents of isolated states like Wyoming, Alaska, the Dakotas, Montana, Idaho, and so on who have the voting power (in the senate) of half of the United State’s population, and who simply want to just raise their pistol nozzle to push the tip of their cap back on their head and believe that the world is a place in which the biggest problem is the fox that pesters their chickens, knowing they are safe behind some great ocean (whatever might be its name), and that there really ISN’T anything out there that could be a problem, except for the government! And if such a thing DID show up, their dog would chase it away, or they could shoot it.

If George Bush had had one of these peeved senators on his watch he would not have been able to invade Iraq - at least not until he had accumulated all the money he might need to conduct an eight-year long war already in the treasury.

So what is the problem now? Where are the other senators? Where is the senate leader? Where is the president of the United States now? Hmmmmm. Seems like they all want to retain their elected positions. That’s really too bad, they would all make great lobbyists.