The other day I wrote that John Boehner’s description of the bailout bill as a crap sandwich was symbolic of our political predicament generally. I concluded that no matter how you slice it, it’s crap sandwiches for as far as the eye can see.
I had no idea that I was painting the rosy scenario. But look at the Senate bill. It is to crap sandwiches what the giant Twinkie referenced in Ghostbusters is to, uh, enormous metaphorical cake products. It brings to mind one of those eight-foot subs you get for Super Bowl parties, only this one stretches off far into the horizon and then bends with the curvature of the earth like the Great Wall of China. The Senate managed to dress the sandwich so that it is in fact much more craptacular than the House version. Whatever defense one can muster for the wooden arrow tax breaks (take that fiberglass arrow-making scum!), it’s just bizarre from the standard of earth logic. At least with the House version of the bill, one got the sense that the political class did not in fact like eating crap sandwiches. The Senate version makes it clear that many of our elected leaders are in fact not so much coprophagic but caecotrophic (caecotrophic organisms re-ingest their own waste for nutritional purposes). When the House — for good or ill — served the crap sandwich to the Senate, the Senators not only ate it with relish (mmmm crap), they slathered on condiments and piled high the side dishes which seem even more repugnant than the main course. And, when asked to defend it, the good senators reply “that’s how we eat crap in the world’s greatest deliberative body.”
But, thanks to Barack Obama’s “sweeping” ethics reform, we can at least be sure they’ll eat it standing up.