PYTHONS GO HOME ! (BOAS TOO!)
Because we were wallowing in our hate mail at GFHQ yesterday, we didn’t get a chance to look at the papers too closely. It’s a shame, because in yesterday’s Washington Post there was at least one mention of a pressing issue which transcends the tired dichotomies of Left and Right, liberal and conservative, Third Way and, uh, Negative Third Way. The politics of failure have failed! (What’s the from?) Romulan and Klingon, Borg and Species 3472 (or whatever that number is), Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton’s pants can all agree on this one issue. It is the Miller Lite of American politics, both filling less and tasting great.
I am of course referring to the fact that society – civil and governmental – should do everything it can to keep twelve foot pythons, or boa constrictors, from eating your dog. We don’t have to be fanatics about this. Yes, if you decide to bring your pooch to a Third World jungle you are on your own (we don’t want to create a moral hazard, as the green-eye shade gang calls it).
But, as Franklin Roosevelt said, the first freedom is the freedom from fear. So, when the Pesti family of Gaithersburg Maryland heard yelping in their backyard only to discover that a 12 foot long serpent was coiled around their dog Dusty on its way to eating it, I must protest. Indeed, I am willing to say, nay proclaim, that this must never happen again. Let the chips fall where they may.
Little Dusty was nearly choked to death by a huge friggin’… — well, the Washington Post couldn’t be sure whether it was Burmese python or a boa constrictor – but I say it matters not! It was a snake! And any twelve foot snake from a country that employs child labor should not be allowed to prowl (do snakes prowl? Again, it matters not!) the dappled “woods” of Chi-Chi’s and TGI Friday’s suburban America. At least not without a visa and a very good reason.
No one wants to be a demagogue on such issues, because we are all in this together, we are one American family when it comes to protecting our pets and children from snakes from countries that don’t pay back their IMF loans in a timely manner. That’s right, it takes a village to keep non-indigenous monsters out of the back yard, but I haven’t been this outraged since they invented bear repellent that attracts bears.
I suppose by this point some reader wants the actual facts. Well, I say, in the great tradition of Lanny Davis, to Hell with the facts! They are irrelevant when even one floppy eared fluff puppy is in danger of being consumed by a reptile with a dislocatable jaw.
But here are the facts anyway. A big honkin’ snake showed up in the backyard of the Pesti family. No one knows where it came from (but oh yes, we can theorize). It grabbed Dusty, a mixed terrier who had slipped out through the kitchen patio to have some quality “me time” with a tree. When they heard Dusty’s whelps the family came out and did battle with the serpent for fifteen minutes before they could pry Dusty from the beast. They had to bring the dog, unconscious, to the veterinary hospital.
Animal control was no help. Indeed, the Pestis spotted the snake days before the attack and called the humane society — which holds Montgomery County’s animal control contract. It is their job to retrieve “unwanted animals” according to the Post. But the Humane Society, said they wouldn’t come get it unless it was “contained.” Mr. Pesti should have said, “hey doofus! I’ll give you three guesses why I’m calling you.”
Alas, the Post does not tell us what the family’s actual response to this post-modern Catch-22 was. (You see, the point I’m getting at here is that people call for animal control especially when they can’t control an animal. Animal control, schmanimal control, when it comes to field mice and sparrows. But there are cases when you need a professional.
“Hello animal control? Hi yeah, there’s a half-starved wolverine which looks like James Carville with a hangover eating my spleen. Could you send someone out here to get it?”
“Sir, do you have the animal under control?”
“Well, not as such. But he seems — ow, ow — to be sticking to the general ‘spleen-area.’ Does that count as ‘control.’?”
“Perhaps as much as anything does in this hurly-burly world of fin de siècle America. Besides, don’t you think that control qua control is really just an illusion? I subscribe to chaos theory myself, but I think that Maurice Merleau-Ponty has much to offer us here — I’m talking the Phenomoneology of Perception here, of course. I know, I know, you’re saying to yourself that…
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t interrupt. You’re saying to yourself what warmed-over Heideggarian existentialism have to do with chaos theory?”
“Well, actually ma’am I was wondering whether you could do something about this wolverine? He’s about done with my spleen and he still looks very hungry…”
“What? Look, this is just a summer job for me before I go back to Yale to finish my degree. If you’re not interested in a thoughtful discussion or if you want to hew to that Popperian pedantry, could you just call back in the Fall?)
Where’s the outrage?
ANOTHER CLINTON LIE DEBUNKED
Someone get Geraldo a Kleenex.
The Washington Post reports this morning that the beloved theory of Joe Conason, James Carville, et. al., has been debunked. That theory of course was that Judge David Hale had been bribed for his testimony against the Clintons.
It should be no surprise that the story is fairly well-hidden inside the paper and will likely evaporate before any of the networks report on it. But since the press is so found of loudly mocking Clinton-critics for their conspiracy theories, it’s worth pointing out that this was just another smear manufactured by Starr-haters to make everybody seem dirty.