Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Today's time square sentinel makes careful note: "members of Congress" are muttering about "violations" by Emperor O'Barry of nothing less than the 1973 "war powers act"!

Ahh, the war powers act...the war powers act... slowly I turn... step by step.... What a fucking noodle rod of chastisement that has been all these years, eh?

I suspect almost anyone of my Woodstockian generation recalls the feckless spasm of representative gubmint that produced it, way back there during the oh so horrific Nixonian miasma. But dare I say the memory comes only with a certain wistful chortle?

What a notion, now: the war powers act, unleashed from the stone like the Golem, to crush Barry in its embrace. What a contemplation that is, eh, comrades?

Stillborn wouldn't be too unfair a description -- stillborn and then pickled in a milk bottle and left under Frank Church's desk in the senate. Such has been the utterly lifeless history of this mocked bit of midnight-hour playacting by our nation's legislature.

A noble attempt to override Uncle's overreach? Perhaps failed, but nonetheless magnificant in its aspiration?

Hell, no. The damn thing is only noble and magnificent in its cynical contrived impotence. It's just another witch-doctor brandishment, like that perpetually waved shrunken head, the nuclear option.

From day one of its enactment till this morning's bomb runs over Col Q's camel tent that solemn act of Congress has been mocked and traduced at every turn. The damn thing has been shit on like a park monument. There's been act-defying "armed interventions" by every, yes every, single succeeding POTifex maximus.

The whole business is just bitterly, laughably farcical.

Any mention of the war powers act deserves the purest form of Curly Howard's dukes-flying rampage. It's so infamous, so infuriating, so enervating, that merely at the mention, well we all oughta....

Alas, my sputter fails me here in mid-motion. Come on, Paine, why bother to saw the air like old Lear? Isn't it far far better each of us simply subsides into one of those satori acts of pitch black sarcasm? Haven't we had enough indignation over the failures of Congress for ten lifetimes? It is we who are the fools, to get ants in the pants here... no?

If we keep this rallying up, it's us pwog croakers and lefticulated earthworms that are the hopeless dupes, not the juke-box players at the Nueva York "Kabuki Times" -- 'tis we that are the mutual face-slapping stooges.

What are we shaking our fists at, if not each other? And we do it at every senseless galvanic twitch of this dead third appendage of gubmint, this hunk of ham trailing along after the mighty death star of the... republic.