Let tell you a parable.

Once upon a time that has not yet happened – and will almost certainly not actually happen – there will be a certain starship, with a certain Captain… captaining it. And this starship will, as starships of that sort often do, encounter an amazingly heavy-handed metaphor in the form of two anthropomorphized black-and-white cookies determined to destroy each other.

(pause)

Hold on: this has a point, I swear.Well, our Captain is not particularly interested in this conflict, given that neither black-and-white cookie is a large-breasted female – but the two cookies are determined to drag him and his ship into their unsubtle social commentary*, so the Captain decides to blow up his own ship with a computerized self-destruct sequence, just to get the two cookies’ attention. And this works: getting the cookies’ attention, that is, not blowing up the ship. Attention is definitely gotten, and the captain gets the cookies to stand down. And then one of the cookies, being only an idiot when the script requires it, goes and burns out the portions of starship’s computers that regulate the computerized self-destruct sequence**.

Annnnnnd now you know why former Senator Bob Bennett (R, UT) got tossed out on his ear in 2010, while current Senator Orrin Hatch (R, UT) looks like he’s in a good place to survive a challenge in 2012. It’s because Hatch paid attention to what happened to Bennett, and acted accordingly. Which in this case meant organizing like crazy for the delegate selection process. And, if first accounts are accurate, it’s paid off; Hatch’s delegates largely won over those of Hatch’s primary opponents.

Moral of the story? Just because something works once doesn’t mean that it’ll work every time, unless of course you’re facing an idiot. And it would appear that Senator Hatch is not an idiot, so anybody trying to replace him in the Senate would probably be well-advised to not assume that he’s as dumb as, say, your average Democratic politician.

Or an anthropomorphized black-and-white cookie.

Moe Lane (crosspost)

*Did you know that people complained that the new Star Trek reboot just blew stuff up, and didn’t give us amazing social commentary like the Black-and-White Cookie Episode? – And, yes, the people complaining were mostly progressives. How did you know?

**From there it’s only a short trip to the cookies’ original planet, where we discover that the rest of the population has already conveniently killed each other off over a point of chromatic patterning. Unaccountably, the episode does not end with the starship Captain dropping a photon torpedo on the two black-and-white cookies now pointlessly fighting on the planet’s surface, then calling Starfleet to let them know that he’s just found a perfectly nice M-Class planet whose inconveniently belligerent and powerfully psionic population have conveniently killed each other off… and left the ruins for other species to loot.