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Kids & Republicans Say the Darndest Things
 My 7-year old son came home from school yesterday and recounted a political discussion he had with his friends on the playground about our congressman, Rep. Charlie Bass (R-NH).
“I told them if you want to know about Bass,” he said, “Just take the ‘B’ off his name.” Then he said, “They all laughed, so I told them you taught me that.”
Which is patently false. I never said any such thing. But every time he gets caught swearing, he blames it on me. And people believe the little shit.
What’s more interesting than my son’s budding stand-up career, or whether I can expect a visit from the Child Welfare Office, is the thought of second graders taking time out of kickball to argue politics. It’s a good indication that a sea change is coming.
Another indicator is the low number of undecided voters in the polling data. Given the major industry polling has become, there are new numbers every day, and more often than not, fewer than 10% of respondents are “Don’t Knows.” Undecideds generally don’t vote, but this election cycle their numbers are steadily dwindling, and that doesn’t bode well for incumbents.
I realize these are unscientific extrapolations, but so are most polls – especially exit polls – since they’ve been “wrong” in the last three elections. And spare me the wisdom of the chattering class on cable TV, all of whom have a vested interest in the outcome, and are far less less reliable than my kid’s school yard comments. So while the opinions of 7-year olds may not count for much in Washington, the fact that they have them at all should raise an alarm for the party in power.
The House Ethics Committee investigation of La Cage aux Foley will turn out to be just another punch line in the longstanding joke that ethics have become under Republican rule. Remember Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO)? He used to chair the ethics panel until he and his colleagues had the temerity to rule against then-Majority Leader Tom Delay. For that act of ethical independence, Speaker Hastert, who is as much a target of this investigation as Foley himself, gutted the committee. So what will the new chairman, Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA), and Rep. Judy Biggert (R-Il), the only members of the panel not to get the boot by Hastert after the Delay debacle, do? Not much – not now, nor after the election.
The RNC campaign ad featuring UBL&Co (I know you’ve seen because I have, and I don’t even have television at my house) is meant to scare the bejesus out of the sheeple who call themselves “values voters.” Karl Rove, Brokeback Mehlman, and the rest of Republican officialdom know that they’ve given these same voters plenty of reason to stay home on election day, so it’s time to drag out bin Laden and frighten us all again. But before conservatives, right-wing Christians, and the generally terrorized fall for this line of horseshit another time, they might ask themselves why UBL is still out there, free to terrorize the timid among us, free to inspire copy-cats in Iraq and the UK, free to wage a propaganda war against the US, which the Republicans, with the airing of this nonsense, are now openly complicit in.
Bush told us in the last presidential election that he doesn’t even think about bin Laden, because he’s irrelevant. As it is with so many things in this administration – from “stay the course” to WMD, to who knew what about Foley and when – which is it? 
~Jack McEnany
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