Waiter, There's a Lie in My Oatmeal!

So I'm at work, and there's Nicky the Geek opening his morning oatmeal. As always, Nick stops to read the trivia question on the package. It's usually something like "how thick is the concrete in Dick Cheney's brain—whoops, I mean, bunker?" or "how large, in millimeters, was the cyst on Rush Limbaugh's butt that kept him from serving in the military?"

So Nick was a little disturbed at the question on his oatmeal today. "Since when is this trivia?" he asked in a gravelly rasp. I thought about it and suggested, "maybe it's trivial to those who believe that anyone under the age of 25 is most likely a blind follower of that Communist terrorist sympathizer, Michael Moore." Let's face it, in this culture, once you get to be 18, you're either meat for the IED's on Route Irish or else you're a scumbag lefty brat who hands his allowance over to moveon.org.

It was a bad day for poor Nicky the Geek from there. He was already hung over from the office Christmas party the night before (there—I wrote the word Christmas in the blog; 20 Gibson FOX points for me); which had ended in a raucous invasion of a G.O.P. fundraiser, where everyone was trying to drown the government in a bathtub filled with vodka. Ah, fer fun...

So Nick's poor head was pounding like Bill Gates' fists at the mention of the word "google". He didn't need his brown-sugar-cinnamon hangover therapy muddled with voting trivia; because for some strange reason, Nick doesn't believe that voting is trivial.

What do you do then, for a man in distress where there ain't a sunrise or a screwdriver to be had? You give him some good news—the best you can find in this beleaguered world of ours. So I told him about Bubba making a stand for the planet at the Canadian environmental conference. Pat Leahy, quoting a guy that Bill O'Reilly would call a scumbag Francophile, sounded a rare note of truth at the Senate hearings on the Patriot Act:

"Benjamin Franklin once said that a country that would give up their liberties for security deserves neither," said Mr. Leahy, also a former prosecutor.

Meanwhile, Stewart's still laying open the Bushies' book of fairy tales. Hard to believe that his approval rating's going back up.

That last remark might have been a mistake. Last I checked, Nicky the Geek was on all fours, decorating the carpet with the Quaker's breakfast. Damn, that brought back some warm memories...