Three Amusing Items

For various reasons, some of the news I encountered this week caused me to chuckle. That's convenient since I have some loose ends to tie up before Mrs. Van Horn and I head to the hospital to deliver Baby Van Horn some time within the next few days...

1. Michael Hurd says all that needs to be said about Anthony Weiner: "He was so drunk on power that he couldn't imagine being exposed in this way, much less being abandoned by the likes of his boss, Nancy Pelosi." My sophomoric amusement at the impossible-to-avoid (and probably unintentional) pun aside, read the whole thing. The same analysis applies to other sleaze-balls, like Eliot Spitzer.

2. Back when I was in OCS, the powers that be constantly made minor rule changes that we had to keep up with. Once, due to an error in how they defined "morning," this led to the following absurd situation: It was, for a day or so, technically correct to say, "Good morning, sir," between evening colors and midnight. San Francisco recently achieved, if not exactly the same kind of absurdity, about the same level when it recently began considering a ban on the sale of goldfish within its borders.

3. Conservative commentator Mona Charen, properly advising the Republican presidential field not to be bullied by debate moderators into leaving out all context, notes the following blatant contradiction:

Since they insisted upon expressing their views in full sentences and paragraphs, rather than the monosyllables the moderator was hoping for, he tried later in the evening to dictate their answers. Turning to Ron Paul, [moderator John] King said:

"So, congressman, come into the conversation. As you do, don't make it just about foreclosures. This is -- this is an interesting topic of discussion, especially -- especially when money is scarce and you've got to start cutting. It's a question of priorities. What should the government be doing? And maybe what should the government be doing in a better economy that it can't do now that has to go?

"So talk about foreclosures a bit, but then tell me something, if you were president and you were dealing with it in your first few weeks, and you said, 'I might like to do this, but I can't afford to do this,' be as specific as you can, what goes?"

That question clocked in, by the way, over 100 words.

This silliness was supposedly in the interest of saving time, but the moderator also asked about such things as, "Regular or spicy?"

Oh, and none of the candidates called King on any of this, which is too bad, or the situation could have been funnier: "[W]hen the questioner is insufferable, as King was in New Hampshire, the candidate who confronts him will be the hero of the night."

-- CAV