Sad/Funny

Thanks to RLK for the following two items. I hope Kos' ass freezes after he reads the first one. As if...

The obituaries for Gene McCarthy had little relevance to the man I knew and a lot to do with the accepted clichés of journalists. A man who runs for president against an incumbent of his own party is going to have the word “quixotic” glued to his rear end, and a man who doesn’t have the arrogance of a rhino, who actually has a sense of humor about himself, is going to be “diffident.” This is discouraging to the older person. You can work hard all your life and in the end they will get you wrong. It’s merciful that you get to die before you have to chance to read what they say.

Long before McCarthy went to the Chicago convention in 1968, he knew that he had lost the nomination. This offended many of his supporters, who expected him to ride his white horse through the streets. But McCarthy wasn’t that man. He was from small-town Minnesota. And he knew how to count votes. He once said, “One thing about a pig, he thinks he’s warm if his nose is warm. I saw a bunch of pigs one time that had frozen together in a rosette, eachone’s nose tucked under the rump of the one in front. We have a lot of pigs in politics.” He wasn’t one of them. Gene McCarthy wrote a poem that begins with the names of women he knew as a boy—“Mathilda Ophoven, Minnie Quast, Lucinda Nistler, Verena Brixius,” who

Could cook potatoes
Eight ways at least
And believed any illness would yield
To eucalyptus tea, and brandy.

He may have been the last man in American public life to quote from Yeats or Frost and do it because he himself loved the poem and knew it by heart and not because a speechwriter had inserted it in the text. And he found poetry in the names of the old ladies of Watkins, Minn. May God’s eternal light shine upon him.

[Garrison Keillor]

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Why didn't they publicize this BEFORE the last presidential election? That's when we should have been told!!! I'm thinking there was political pressure for the CDC to keep quiet about this.

The Center for Disease Control has issued a warning about a new virulent strain of Sexually Transmitted Disease. The disease is contracted through dangerous and high-risk behavior. The disease is called Gonorrhea Lectim and pronounced "gonna re-elect him." Many victims contracted it in 2004, after having been screwed for the past four years. Cognitive characteristics of individuals infected include: anti-social personality disorders, delusions of grandeur with messianic overtones, extreme cognitive dissonance, inability to incorporate new information, pronounced xenophobia and paranoia, inability to accept responsibility for own actions, cowardice masked by misplaced bravado, uncontrolled facial smirking, ignorance of geography and history, tendencies towards evangelical theocracy, categorical all-or-nothing behavior. Naturalists and ! epidemiologists are amazed at how this destructive disease originated only a few years ago from a bush found in Texas.