Please Stand By

A regular meeting, two irregular conference calls, all in the middle of a closing week smack in the midst of budget season is more excuse than I shall ever need to cover a day here without posting.

I'm already behind on yesterday's ample grist. Fortunately today only saw three [okay, four....] stories of note.

***Outgoing Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, the man who squandered and lost the biggest Republican senate majority in at least eighty years (matching the "achievement" of incoming Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott), announced today that he will not, after all, be running for president in 2008.

I wonder what his first clue was.

***Ex-SecState Uncle Colin helpfully contributed to the meltdown of America's Middle East war effort by parroting the lie that Iraq is in "civil war" and the tiresome "realist" canard that the best way to "fight terrorism" is to "reach out" to Islamic Fundamentalists.

***Meanwhile, two days after Iraqi president Jalal Talibani cried out for help to Iran to "establish security and stability" in his country whose security and stability is being ferociously undermined by his would-be rescuer, he reached a "security agreement" in a hastily arranged summit meeting with Iranian fuehrer Adolph Ahmadinejad, after which the latter urged the United States to cut & run from Iraq as being "in our own best interests". This at the same time that the Iraqis abruptly scotched a meeting in Jordan between President Bush and Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

My, but the neoVietnam worm is turning fast. And the Democrats haven't even officially taken power yet, either.

***Just behold what one of their incoming freshman is bragging about now:

Newly elected Senator Jim Webb, D-VA, was so infuriated by a remark from President George W. Bush that the former Marine officer was tempted to punch the commander-in-chief.

The confrontation, disclosed in the influential Washington, D.C.-based publication The Hill, came shortly after the midterm elections at a private White House reception for newly elected lawmakers.

Webb, who defeated Republican Senator George Allen in Virginia, ran a campaign critical of the administration’s Iraq policy, and has a son, a Marine lance corporal, serving in Iraq.

At the reception, Bush asked Webb how his son was doing. Webb answered that he really wanted to see his son brought back home, a source close to Webb reported. "I didn’t ask you that, I asked how he’s doing,” Bush countered, according to the source.

Emily Heil wrote in The Hill: "Webb confessed that he was so angered by this that he was tempted to slug the commander-in-chief, reported the source, but of course didn’t.”

If Webb's not committing a federal felony was such a foregone conclusion, why is he making such a point of talking up his temptation to do so after the fact? Is he trying to impress fellow Donk caucus-mate Mary Landrieu of Louisiana, the last Dem senator to threaten to physically attack the President?

Frankly, I wish one of them would try. Wouldn't it have been a hoot to see Webb lunge at Bush, get swarmed, beaten down, and dragged away by the Secret Service, and the Democrats forfeit control of the Senate back to the GOP?

Oops, that's right, Virginia has a Donk governor, doesn't it? So why didn't Webb just cut loose anyway?

Ah, well. Perhaps at the State of the Union Address Dubya should wear a big lapel pin that says, "Are ya feelin' lucky, punk? Well, are ya?" Not only could he put the DisLoyalists in their place like he did Webb, but we might be able to get both houses of Congress back in one fell swoop. That'd be worth a few presidential bruises and stitches, if you ask me.