Teapot Dumb

One year out of six, Iowa's U. S. Senator Charles Grassley gets off his butt and starts looking busy. No actual work involved, but he suddenly rediscovers "wasteful guvmint spending" and "bringing home the bacon fat for Iowa."

In off years when Republicanics control the Senate, he becomes the "powerful Senate Judiary Committee Chairman" and uses powerful armwaving to pass through a snerd of draconian bankruptcy measures which make it easier for Big Banks to pwn your bod for "running up foolish credit card debt."

In off years when Republicanic senators don't control the Senate, good ole country boy Chuck throws your rhetorical granny under the euthanasis bus and smarfs that its ackshooly the Democrat Party doing it.

That's a lot of hand flapping, but somehow "Killer" always manages to bring home that baby bumblebee.

How to abort national health care

I don't know what role the sinister Senator Grassley thinks he should play in deciding what kind of national health care this country should have, but Dog In The Manger is probably not it. The arguments have been laid out for seven decades. It's time for at least this one "ranking member of the powerful Senate Finance Committee (and twice former Chairman)" to get out of the way of history.

It's odd. Grassley never was an idiot, but he always got elected in Iowa by playing the role of Mortimer Snerd and grabbing H. R. Gross' eponym (at least according to Republicans) of "conscience of the Congress."

In practice, Grassley's majority-style politics when Republicans held the Senate have been a strangler's grip on the carotid arteries of the poor and downtrodden — bankruptcy reform, a change few voters were clamoring for. Watching Grassley slog gleefully through the details of that process was disconcerting, like watching Hannibal Lecter toning up.

I don't know how vulnerable Grassley will be if he continues in this jugular vein when national health care comes to the floor, if it ever does. If it dies a-borning, Grassley will certainly get full credit for the abortion in most quarters.

Iowans love that Hickenlooper style, though. It's one Tom Harkin shares. We're a bunch of rubes out here in caucus country, bobbing for ethanol and Adam's apples where the tall potatoes grow.

Twitterpated

Speaking of pwecious, overpwiced nerds, U.S. Senator Chuck Gwasswey (Iowa's twerp senior senator^†) has discovered the joys of micwobwogging — he popped off a nasty tweet or two about President Obama the other day and got held up in the national media to other old folks as an example of how not to tweet: "I did, I did taw a puddy tat!"

^†Iowa's twerp junior senator is, of course, Tom Harkin. They're both older than me.