Raising the Debt Limit (Explained)

Congress has agreed to a budget for the first time since 2009. We’d praise Congress for this accomplishment if it weren’t one of the most basic elements of their job—much in the same way that we don’t typically gush all over a plumber who managed to avoid blowing up our house.

Still, we’ll take what we can get . . . and in this case, what we can get is apparently a deal that does little to nothing to address the deficit, national debt, or the debt ceiling.

The more we think about this, the more our attitude moves away from “faint praise” toward “sarcastic praise,” so rather than shoving this post full of snide, half-baked, uninformed commentary, we’ll leave you with an informative video that makes it all seem almost funny:

The 24-Hour News Cycle Finally Fails Us

But what did he eat? For the love of God, man, WHAT DID HE EAT???

This Post Brought to You by Indignation, Irony, and Hypocrisy

Among the many benefits of being a citizen of the United States of America in the twenty-first century are that:

• we are the beneficiaries—assuming we’ve taken advantage of it—of twelve years’ worth of free schooling¹ in an educational system that, while perhaps not the best in the world, is certainly better than the alternative.²

• we have unparalleled access—thanks to a nationwide network of public libraries, bookstores, and an internet filled almost entirely with deftly phrased, mature, and well-researched philosophical discussions, to thousands of years’ and millions of pages’ worth of the human race’s most compelling, challenging, enlightening, and thought-provoking political and philosophical thought.

• we are spiritual descendants of a distinguished intellectual tradition that began with luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin, and thrived for centuries until it was unceremoniously murdered by Philo T. Farnsworth.

So with all that in mind, it wouldn’t be odd to expect Americans to engage in well-spoken, well-educated, thoughtful political discourse, would it?

(Crickets chirping)

 

Suck it, Jefferson. You knew it would come to this.

On my drive home from work the other day I spotted a bumper sticker that read “If you voted for Obamtard, thanks a lot, ASSHAT.”

My second reaction³ to this was disgust and dismay that this is how real live grown-up Americans—educated adults, most of us, with literally hundreds of thousands of hours’ worth of opportunities to practice shaping and polishing our thoughts to convince and inspire—are choosing to express their political views these days. It’s like we’re going out of our way to prove that putting power in the hands of the common people was a tragic, hilarious mistake, that the best we can do to express a difference in political opinion is to resort to name-calling and using language better suited for a bathroom stall.⁴

My first reaction to the bumper sticker was “what a dickhead.”⁵

NOTES

1. Or more than twelve years, if you flunk a couple of times. Hey, why not? Free school! And by “free” we of course mean “paid for by everybody, so not actually free, but sort of like free if you’ve had just the right amount to drink.”
2. That alternative being, for the sake of our argument, “not going to school and being a big fat idiot.”
3. Yes, second, not first. Keep reading; I promise it’ll all make sense. Or at least, it’ll make as much sense as any of the bullshit you typically find here.
4. “Asshat” is, I admit, not true bathroom-stall language—it’s far from being in the same league as f-----, c--ks-----, w--r-, --t--a--, or s--d---h-e--er. On the other hand, it’s a stupid, tired, overused term, and you’re a total f----- if you use it. Knowledgeable sources have described the term as “the douchebag’s ‘douchebag.’ ”
5. For what it’s worth—not that it’s necessarily any of your business—we didn’t vote for President Obama, and given the chance to do it over, we’d not vote for him again.

It's Over Now. So Please, If You Would, Be Quiet.

One of these guys absolutely and definitively will—or did—ruin (or save) the
United States of America. But for some reason the lunatics on the other side decided to
reward him (or punish him) for it—whichever one makes them seem more like lunatics.

Yes, the Presidential election is over, and yes, you now get—or are stuck with—four exciting or devastating years of the President who will either save or destroy everything good left in this country, depending on which half of the population you’re willing to casually dismiss as stupid, hateful, and/or evil in order to make the world seem just the way you’ve already decided it is.

But now that it’s all settled, we have a novel suggestion:

Why don’t we all just keep quiet for a while? 

The following people could use a break:

1. folks who are aware that your candidate is full of shit.
2. folks who are aware that both candidates are full of shit.
3. folks who are aware that their own candidate is full of shit.

So seethe or rejoice all you want, but for the sake of decency and whatever remains of our tattered national sanity and our ability to interact like thoughtful grown-ups,¹ please do it quietly.

And please, above all, keep your opinions off the internet for a while. It’s already the world’s angriest, stupidest, most irrational place; adding political opinions absolutely does not improve matters. Ideally, we’d like to see folks voluntarily keep their political opinions off the internet forever, but we know that’s asking a lot, so we’ll accept a measly four years of silence if we can get it.

Thanks for your time. We look forward to hearing from you never again.


NOTE
1. If you think we still have the ability to interact like thoughtful grown-ups, you haven’t spent much time on the internet. Trust us, you’re better off keeping it that way.

Food for Thought as you Head to the Voting Booth

 

“There is nothing which I dread so much as a division of the republic into two great parties, each arranged under its leader, and concerting measures in opposition to each other. This, in my humble apprehension, is to be dreaded as the greatest political evil under our Constitution.”

 —JOHN ADAMS, statesman, diplomat, Aldrin to George Washington’s Armstrong

“It is a greater thing to be a good citizen than to be a good Republican or a good Democrat.”

—GIFFORD PINCHOT, guy you’ve probably never heard of

“Political language—and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists—is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

—GEORGE ORWELL, English novelist and journalist

“Party leads to vicious, corrupt and unprofitable legislation, for the sole purpose of defeating party.”

—JAMES FENIMORE COOPER, American novelist

“There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour.”  

—BENJAMIN DISRAELI, nineteenth-century British Prime Minister

“I find myself  . . . hoping a total end of all the unhappy divisions of mankind by party-spirit, which at best is but the madness of many for the gain of a few.”

—ALEXANDER POPE, eighteenth-century English poet

“I hate all politics. I don't like either political party. One should not belong to them—one should be an individual, standing in the middle. Anyone that belongs to a party stops thinking.”  

—RAY BRADBURY, American novelist

“The old parties are husks, with no real soul within either, divided on artificial lines, boss-ridden and privilege-controlled, each a jumble of incongruous elements, and neither daring to speak out wisely and fearlessly on what should be said on the vital issues of the day.”

—THEODORE ROOSEVELT, twenty-sixth President of the United States of America

“However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.

—GEORGE WASHINGTON, dollar bill guy

“I was no party man myself, and the first wish of my heart was, if parties did exist, to reconcile them.”

—GEORGE WASHINGTON, welcoming you to the Hall of Presidents

“All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.”

—JOHN ARBUTHNOT, Scottish physicist, mathematician, and satirist

We would add: “. . . but not nearly fast enough.” 



 

Bowling in the Dark's Endorsement for President of the United States:

 

Montgomery Brewster, pitcher, Hackensack Bulls

 
 

A platform we can get behind:

 “I wanna thank you for coming out today . . . to see to it that neither my opponents nor me win the election. I wanna ask the question:

Q. Who’s buying the booze?  
A: [Montgomery Brewster.]

Q: Who’s buying the food? 
A: [Montgomery Brewster.]

Q: And who’s trying to buy your vote? 
A: [Technically everybody, but also Montgomery Brewster.]

Q: And who you’re gonna vote for? 
A: None of the above! 

Q: Say it again! 
A: None of the above! 

Q: Let me hear it one more time! 
A: None of the above! 

Yeah, sure, we’ve all heard that one before.

Drunk History

Bowling in the Dark does not condone public drunkenness, unless it’s educational. Or funny. Today we learn a lot about cell phones and tennis shoes, both of which existed, believe it or not, in 1804.

Drunk History Vol. 1 - Featuring Michael Cera from Drunk History     

Mangled English

Part 5 of a Potentially Infinite Series

As we understand it, sir, there are indeed other options, but we suspect that they wouldn’t interest you either.

Butterflies: Nature’s Financial Planners

 

For reasons perhaps too complex for mere humans to fully understand, monarch butterflies, like many birds, migrate north and south with the seasons. They’re the only species of butterfly that does so.¹

Hundreds of thousands of butterflies—perhaps millions; it’s really tough to count them because of all the fluttering and flapping, and their looking exactly the same from more than about six inches away—winter over in the Piedra Herrada Sanctuary, a forested mountainside outside of Valle de Bravo, Mexico, some two hours² west of Mexico City.

Tourists fortunate enough to visit Valle de Bravo can, with the help of local guides, hike up the mountainside to view the remarkable sight of swarms of monarch butterflies in their winter habitat, their bright wings swirling in the quiet sky like cascades of autumn leaves.

 

Perhaps more remarkable is that no single butterfly actually survives long enough to return home. The round trip takes several times longer than the typical two-month lifespan of the monarch butterfly, so an entire migration can span some three to four generations.³

What we have here, then, are creatures with the foresight to act in a way that is not particularly useful—or even detrimental—to themselves, but are vastly beneficial to future generations. The monarch butterfly has no written language, no history, and a brain smaller than a toenail clipping, and lives (as far as we can tell) almost purely by instinct, but has the insight to work for the good of descendents that it’s certain never to meet.

We wonder what that’s like.

 

NOTES

Butterfly photos by Dr. Mrs. Some Guy.

1. At least among the species we’ve interviewed.

2. Or four and a half hours, if your driver isn’t sure where he’s going and the major highway is closed.
3. We welcome quibbling with our facts from the butterfly experts amongst our readership. We readily acknowledge that we are not scientists, and presume that the authors of the Wikipedia page we’re reading aren’t either.

This “Outsourcing” Business Has Officially Gone Too Far

  

Sorry, No Anthony Weiner Jokes Today

Anthony Weiner (D-NY).
Stop snickering.

On June 6, 2011, U.S. Representative Anthony Weiner (D-NY) admitted that the inappropriate photograph sent to a West Coast college student was indeed of his own crotch—which he’d previously denied, sort of—and that he, rather than a hacker, was responsible both for the photograph of his equipment and for sending it along.

Bowling in the Dark hereby declares that we plan to continue to go against the grain of childish media and blogosphere coverage by refusing to make cheap jokes capitalizing on the similarity between the Congressman’s name—Weiner—and the popular slang term for male genitalia.

That term, by the way, is “wiener.”

Wiener wiener wiener.

We refuse to describe Rep. Weiner’s situation as a pickle, or his foolish and self-defeating antics as “pulling a boner.” We will not discuss Weiner’s irritated reaction to the constant media scrutiny as “testy,” or point out or that if he hopes to be re-elected, he’s sure to encounter stiff competition. We resolutely refuse to turn this situation into an opportunity to observe how there’s now even more pork in Washington than before, or suggest that Representative Weiner needs to be more frank with his constituents.

In keeping with this small effort to return the internet to a state of dignity and decorum, we will also refrain from mentioning the following politicians if—or more likely when—they find themselves embroiled in humorous and embarrassing dick-based scandals:

• Andrew Johnson
• Lyndon Johnson
• Richard M. Johnson
• Spiro Agnew¹
• Dick Armey
• Dick Cheney
• Dick Lamm
• Dick Posthumus
• Dick Swett
• Peter Murphy
• John Boehner
• Frank Schmuck
• Ben Bushyhead
• George Bush
• George W. Bush
• Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick
• John Cox
• Harry Baals

And it should go without saying that we won’t ever stoop so low as to make a cheap joke out of mentioning such non-politicians as Wee Willie Keeler, Bobby Cox, Dick Trickle, Beaver Dick, Jerk Meat, or Dick Hertz from Holden.²

We appreciate your understanding in this matter as we try to return class and good manners to the blogosphere. Our firm stance on wieners may be hard for you to take, but rest assured, putting our foot down on wieners hurts us far more than it hurts you.

NOTES

1. The name “Spiro Agnew” may not be funny in and of itself, but you can rearrange its letters to spell “grow a penis,” and that’s just great. Thanks, Dave Barry.

2. An old roommate from the east coast once told us that he’d looked in a Holden, Massachusetts, phone book and found “Dick Hertz” in there, but we’re inclined to believe now that he was making it up. What kind of person makes things up? People like our old roommate, we guess. His name was Ollie Tabooger.

Obama's "Real" Birth Certificate Fails to Prove that Hawai'i Isn't in Kenya

Skeptics also note that the “Birth Certificate” fails to include any traditional form of identification such as a driver’s license, credit card or ATM card, DNA map, retinal scan, or stool sample.

In a disappointing but perhaps inevitable concession to the deafening jabbering of some of the most batshit crazy people in our nation’s history,¹ President Barack Obama released his long-demanded long-form birth certificate on April 27, 2011, adding another layer to the colossal mountain of evidence in support of the well-established fact that he was, in fact, born in the United States of America, just as he and the handful of sensible people left in the country—Democrat, Republican, and miscellaneous—have maintained all along.

Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus, in a stunning display of gall that would be hilarious to imagine but an embarrassment because it actually happened, succeeded in distorting his perception of reality to the point where he was actually willing to blame Obama for the distraction this non-issue has caused:

“The president ought to spend his time getting serious about repairing our economy,” Priebus said. “Unfortunately his campaign politics and talk about birth certificates is distracting him from our number one priority—our economy.”²

The good news, though, is that now that Obama has finally decided, once and for all, to stop accusing himself of being born in Kenya despite all the common sense and evidence to the contrary, hassling himself for answers to questions that he shouldn’t have been silly enough to raise in the first place, and interrupting reasonable discussions with his half-baked nonsense about conspiracies, he can get down to finding answers to the real questions at hand.

Those real questions are, of course (1) how could Obama possibly have known, forty-six years before his election, that his future presidency would depend on creating a perfect forgery of both the official birth certificate and the long-form version, and (2) how could he have not only produced such a document but also managed to infiltrate the Hawaiian government offices where such records are kept and insert the birth certificate(s) and all the necessary ancillary paperwork without being undetected, just a few days after he was born? What kind of superhuman infant was he?

The fact of the matter is that those birth certificates and records are there, plain to see, and are indistinguishable in every possible way from real ones—so he obviously pulled it off somehow. But before you start going on about how such Machiavellian scheming, complex motor skills, and mastery of language, government paper stocks, and ink mixture are rare even among children born to supervillains with giant, pulsating brains, you should consider the far more reasonable option: obviously, the current-day Barack Obama simply has access to a time machine, and he traveled back to 1961 and explained these convoluted plans to his younger self in a language that only he and others from his home planet would be able to comprehend.

Honestly, use your heads, people. It’s so simple, a child could have figured it out. Especially one with a giant, pulsating brain. Private citizens had access to time-travel technology as early as 1985; a sitting President could easily have gotten his hands on it.

When this baby hits eighty-eight miles per hour, you’re
going to see some serious shit.

NOTE

1. To be fair, not everyone that wondered about Obama’s birthplace is necessarily batshit crazy. It’s quite possible that a great many of them were sane, but too intellectually lazy to do the very few minutes’ worth of online research required to throw plenty of light on the fact that the claims put forth by birthers have been uniformly ludicrous. Really, we’re trying to be serious here. We know several decent, reasonable people who had their doubts about Obama’s citizenship—friends, some of them, although they might have changed their minds after reading this—and still others who joked about it but, we suspect, didn’t actually buy it . . . and yet we still have no idea how this line of thought is possible in a reasonable person.

2. “Obama releases birth form, decries ‘silliness,’” Denver Post, April 27, 2011.

Trump Considers Republican Presidential Bid; Democrats Wet Pants with Glee

 

Real estate mogul Donald Trump continues to act like, or at least mimic the words of, a man gearing up for a presidential campaign. While he continues to play coy about his actual intentions, he has insinuated in recent interviews that he is inclined to run as a Republican, but, if he runs and fails to win that party’s nomination, he may consider running as an independent.

Trump, if he has a passing familiarity with American history, will be aware that almost exactly one hundred years ago Theodore Roosevelt broke from the Republican Party, watched the Progressive Party (or Bull Moose Party, courtesy of a choice phrase from the eminently quotable Roosevelt himself) spring up around him, and ran for president as its nominee. While Roosevelt lost the 1912 election to Woodrow Wilson, the fractured Republican Party and its ineffectual incumbent, William Howard Taft, lost to both. To this day, Theodore Roosevelt remains the only third-party presidential candidate in American history to defeat one of the two major parties in either electoral or overall votes (having finished second in both).

It’s quite possible that Trump, in a perfectly believable avalanche of high self-esteem, sees himself as a sort of twenty-first century incarnation of Roosevelt, a visionary maverick willing to buck the system to bring the country what it needs: namely, Donald Trump. To be sure, the similarities between Trump and Roosevelt—centuries apart in our minds, but not in our hearts—are hard to avoid:

ROOSEVELT: spent decades of his life as a civil servant, first as a New York state assemblyman, then later as New York City Police Commissioner; he spent just shy of a year as Vice President of the United States, and then seven-plus years as President. On top of that, before his presidency he served in not one but two branches of the U.S. military, first as the Assistant Secretary of the Navy, later resigning from that post to serve in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War.

TRUMP: builds hotels and casinos, several of which have failed to go bankrupt.

ROOSEVELT: grew up as an easterner but lived as a rancher and a hunter, coming to love and admire and even eventually embody the spirit of the American West; was an accomplished naturalist with an ear for birdsong; published nearly three dozen books on military history, ornithology, biography, political commentary, and American history; had enormous personal charisma that often left even his political rivals disarmed, touched, and filled with reluctant admiration; and possessed an astounding breadth and depth of knowledge that would have qualified him as an expert in half a dozen wide-ranging fields.

TRUMP: has his own reality TV show, where he seems to be playing an unconvincing caricature of himself.¹

ROOSEVELT: won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War in 1906, back when actual accomplishments, rather than anticipated accomplishments, were required for that sort of thing.

TRUMP: in 2004 filed a trademark application for the words “You’re fired,” just in case there was money to be made from other people losing their jobs.

Roosevelt’s and Trump’s own words also help to highlight the stunning similarities in their characters and the quality of their thought processes:

“Friends, I shall ask you to be as quiet as possible. I don't know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose. But fortunately I had my manuscript, so you see I was going to make a long speech, and there is a bullet—there is where the bullet went through—and it probably saved me from it going into my heart. The bullet is in me now, so that I cannot make a very long speech, but I will try my best.”²

—Theodore Roosevelt, 1912

“I’m a really smart guy. I was a really good student at the best school in the country.”  

—Donald Trump, 2011

Trump has claimed to be concerned that American has become “the laughingstock and whipping post for the rest of the world.” At almost exactly the same time, however—and with no apparent understanding of irony—he has flung himself willingly onto the birther bandwagon, questioning Barack Obama’s citizenship in a shameless appeal to the nation’s craziest common denominator.

It is unclear whether Trump is aware of the yawning disconnect between his concern for America’s reputation and his endorsement of one of the stupidest conspiracy theories in its history. It’s hard to say whether it’s occurred to him that a blowhard television personality with no political experience may not be the best way for the nation to turn the corner on that whole “laughingstock” thing. What should be fairly obvious—not to mention disappointing and depressing—to the rest of us is the yawning gulf between what gets called a presidential candidate in 2011, and what qualified just one hundred short years ago.

NOTES

1. Other folks with television shows: the Thundercats, the Smurfs, the Transformers, and any number of other cartoonish boobs with political experience similar to Trump’s. It’s to their credit, though, that they were not part of a reality show. Frankly, we’d also probably prefer President Snarf to President Trump.

2. The famously verbose Roosevelt spoke for approximately ninety minutes—a rather long time by the standards of the stunted modern attention span; rather longer yet when you consider that he had a fucking bullet in his chest.

Obama is a Muslim, Intelligent Design is Legitimate Science, Elvis is Alive, and We Never Went to the Moon

At least that’s what I hear from the Tooth Fairy, and he’s a stand-up guy.


Sure as hell can’t hold his liquor, though.

Guam: The Tipping Timebomb of the Pacific

“I have come to the conclusion that one useless man is called a disgrace, that two are called a law firm, and that three or more become a Congress.”

—John Adams¹

The U.S. House of Representatives’ own Hank Johnson of Georgia recently staggered into the spotlight when, while speaking as part of the House Armed Services Committee, he announced his concerns about a possible military buildup on Guam, and its potential negative effects on that island’s stability.

Now, the influx of a large number of troops and their various support services and dependents would be a legitimate concern, if we were talking about potential environmental, economic, and sociological effects on an island as small as Guam—which is, as Johnson put it, only seven miles wide at its “least widest point.”²

Unfortunately, though, it’s not this environmental, economic, and sociological baloney that keeps Rep. Johnson up at night, but rather “[his] fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and capsize.” If you’re the last person on Earth to hear about this story,³ see it for yourself below. The payoff starts at about 1:16, and please also note Admiral Robert Willard’s simple, gracefully respectful response, which is worthy of both admiration and praise:




Johnson’s office later released a statement—perhaps best defined as a nimble but ultimately failed salvage operation—claiming that the Representative was speaking metaphorically, that adding so many troops and dependents could bring the island past “a tipping point [that] would adversely affect the island’s fragile ecosystem and overburden its already overstressed infrastructure.”

I don’t claim to be the world’s greatest expert on the English language, but I’m an avid reader with an English degree and a more than passing familiarity with similes, metaphors, and symbolic use of words. And if Hank Johnson was speaking metaphorically about Guam capsizing, I will literally eat my hat.⁴

Whatever Hank Johnson’s politics are, I don’t care to know them. I don’t know whether his personal life is squeaky-clean and admirable or sordid and abominable, and as long as it doesn’t keep him from doing his job right, I’m not convinced it’s any of my business. What I do care about, though—what I feel is my business—is that he managed to get elected to one of the more exclusive and influential jobs in the country without knowing one of the fundamental differences between an island and a lily pad. That leads be to believe that there have to be other yawning chasms in his knowledge of how the world is put together, and that would affect how well he can do his job.

In case you’re not sure of the difference yourself, we at Bowling in the Dark paid famed director James Cameron $750,000 to create an interactive 3-D visual representation of the most relevant difference. Here is what he sent us:
 

Don’t get me wrong—I distinctly remember a time in my life where I genuinely believed that islands floated on top of the ocean. I recall thinking that the fundamental difference between Australia and, say, Hawaii or Guam was not its sheer size but that it did reach all the way to the bottom of the ocean, and other islands didn’t. I also remember learning that I was wrong about this—and at the time, I wasn’t a member of Congress. I was in grade school.

It seems fair to admit that there probably isn’t any regulation requiring public servants to know that islands are anchored to the ocean floor—but I figured it was the kind of thing that you just can’t not know, like how to breathe, or what word people use to describe a car.⁵ For Hank Johnson to be elected and to continue serving with such an apparent and embarrassing gap in his education is not just his failure or the American education system’s failure, but also a failure of voters to impose a reasonable standard on their elected officials.

(Incidentally, it has been suggested that at the time of his statement, Johnson may have been struggling with side effects caused by medication he’d been taking to treat Hepatitis C. However, according to Newsweek, Johnson had finished his treatments by the time of his Guam statement. So it appears that Johnson’s comments were not the result of an altered mental state caused by prescription drugs. We’re very happy about this, not only because we’re glad he’s feeling better, but also because, as the Newsweek article put it, “[we] may now resume mocking his Guam comments” without feeling like we’re mocking a man’s struggles with a very real illness.⁶)

There’s a saying that “every man rises to the level of his own incompetence,” and as if to illustrate this point, it was recently announced that Representative Hank Johnson not only remains on the House Armed Services Committee (among others), but also has been informed by Speaker Nancy Pelosi that he’s been added to the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure. I don’t know a whole lot about the latter committee, but I’m pretty sure that the House Armed Services Committee is a fairly important one. If we’re going to keep giving this guy responsibilities, that’s fine, but shouldn’t we consider awarding him something with a little less impact, like, say, the House Committee on Teddy Bear and Hello Kitty Affairs?

It’s almost certainly unfair to judge people, politicians or otherwise, for only the most colossally stupid things they’ve said at their most profoundly embarrassing moments.⁷ So I admit that I may be a bit out of line for assuming that Representative Hank Johnson is a dumb guy, simply because he said something really, really stupid that was caught on video. Even smart people make mistakes, some of them very embarrassing, bad, naughty, and/or destructive.

But come on, can you really tell me that a smart person would make this kind of mistake? I don’t believe that. Is it too much to ask the voters in this country—specifically Georgia, in this case—to elect somebody with a basic grasp on how the world is put together? Is it too much to expect that if we’re going to hire people to run this country, wouldn’t it help if they were, you know, smart? God help us all if we continue to elect people just like us. Shouldn’t we be electing people that are smarter than people just like us?

NOTES

1. I haven’t been able (or even tried) to verify whether John Adams ever actually said or wrote this, but William Daniels said it as Adams in 1776—quite possibly the single best movie musical about the American Revolution made in the 1970s—and that’s good enough for me. Also, my apologies to any Bowling in the Dark readers who are disgraces, lawyers, or both.

2. A crack team of Bowling in the Dark linguists have been working around the clock for weeks to figure out just what this means. Results so far have been inconclusive.

3. In keeping with our theme of being well behind this times, this happened in late March and I’m just now getting around to commenting on it. So when I wrote that this happened “recently,” I’m speaking in cosmic terms, rather than in internet terms.

4. That is, I will literally eat a metaphorical hat. Metaphorically.

5. That word is “car.”

6. And we will. We sincerely wish him many long years of good health, but we just as sincerely hope that his surprising misunderstanding of extremely basic geology doesn’t reflect similar misunderstandings of other subjects important to our elected officials, such as law, physics, geography, math, the Constitution, or the theory of evolution. To name a few.
7. Although this hasn’t stopped folks from doing it to Dan Quayle and Al Gore for years now, even going to far as to give them credit for all sorts of stupid things they’d never said.

Sam Bradford Wins 2010 Nobel Prize for Football

In a move that surprised pundits, experts, and casual fans alike, Oklahoma Sooners quarterback Sam Bradford has been awarded the 2010 Nobel Prize for Football. Bradford, 1-1 as a starting quarterback this season, missed three full games—and half of the season-opening loss to Brigham Young University—and has yet to play the seven regular-season games remaining on the schedule.

The Nobel Prize jurors dismissed suggestions that their selection, coming less than halfway through the season, was premature.

"Our decision was merited and unanimous," said committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland, proving that to say something is merited is to make it so. As evidence, Jagland pointed to both of Bradford's 2009 touchdown passes, and his having gone five games without throwing an interception. "I bet he wouldn't have thrown any even if he'd actually played in all five games."

"The question we have to ask is who has done the most this season to enhance college football," continued Jagland, "and who has done more in his two games than Sam Bradford?"

Criticism of the Nobel committee's decision was written off as being fueled by racism, which, of course, it is. "Receiving this distinguished award will serve to show the rest of the world how committed Bradford is to football, and if anything, will make it even more likely that he'll win every game from here on out."