Well, the 111th Congress is in town, and God help us all.  It was an inauspicious beginning with the cowardly lion, little Harry Reid–lacking the cheerful redemptive mien of the Hollywood original–waffling on the matter of seating  Blago’s hack and staring down the proverbial gun barrel at the looming spectacle of Al Frankin.   Little Harry has been in town long enough to realize that the upcoming Frankin larceny bodes little good for long term Democrat prospects in spite of the math of one more vote.  It is not the theft itself that will come back to haunt, of course, since the media can be counted on to toss that under the rug.  No, the problem will be Al Frankin himself, the sheer mass of the absurdity, the transparency of it. 

Even the simple donkey can be expected to only bear so much weight on much abused shoulders before the inevitable stumble and collapse.  Harry may not be the brightest bulb in the box, and Lord knows backbone has never been his strong suit, but the little grey man from Nevada does possess a dose or two 0f that low-brow animal cunning  that one associates with the professional politician, so he has to know, subliminally, that trouble is-a-brewing with this Frankin business.  The difficulty will arise, after percolating for a year or two, when even the most dim-witted New York Times reading,  Jerry Springer watching, B. Hussein Obama loving voters in all the land will finally glimpse what it will mean to have a United States Senate with the likes of an Al Frankin among its ranks.  Not on Saturday Night Live or in some cheap horror flick, but for real.  Look back on all of the SNL skits that you have seen in the past thirty years and think of even one that approaches this reality when it comes to ridiculous improbability.  Imagine what you would have said if someone had told you years ago, as you watched his idiotic cavorting, that this guy would one day become a United States Senator. 

All of this is not to excuse the fact that there are, indeed, many clowns infesting the U. S. Senate  at the present time, but it is all a matter of scale.  The Frankin theft will have given us an event that is so impossibly absurd, so utterly laughable, ridiculous, and obscene that even the media and our other wayward friends on the left will be forced to take note as this dark comedy plays out, if such a thing is possible.  In any case, there has to be a breaking point, a place where even the most uninformed, foolish voter will not tread.  We are approaching unbroken ground.  It has taken more than two hundred years to descend  to where we now find ourselves.  It could very well be that the Democrats have unwittingly done us all a great favor by paving a path to a new conservative/Republican awakening with their foolishness.  Perhaps the epitaph of the 111th Congress will be, to borrow from an old Hollywood epic,  A Clown Too Far.

At first, Reid’s intransigence over Blago’s Burris appointment was surprising to those who have watched the Majority Leader in action these past few years.  For a fleeting instant is was perhaps possible for the casual observer to imagine, with the help of a fawning media, that little Harry was making some sort of a stand based upon principle.  What probably occurred was that one of his–read Obama’s–favorites were not chosen by Blago, and an effort was underway to engineer a switch.  As we all know, acting strictly for principal would certainly not be in character for Reid, and Harry lost little time coming around to form.  AP reported: ” Roland Burris failed to capture President-elect Barack Obama’s old Senate seat Tuesday [01/06/2009] in a wild piece of political theater, but the Democrats’ opposition cracked when a key chairwoman said seating him was simply the legal thing to do. Democratic leaders, set to meet with Burris on Wednesday, were searching for a way to defuse the dispute…”.   Bets here are that Harry and the boys will seat Burris before the week is out, or at the least within seven days of this writing.  One can only imagine the furor in the media if the Republicans ever pulled such a move.  By the middle of next week Burris will be hailed in the press as a seasoned statesman and the very soul of honesty, and the Blago connection will disappear, never to be seen or heard of again.