You can take the elephant and the donkey out of the zoo but you can’t take the zoo out of Congress & Courts

Our Heroes

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Nikita Khrushchev told the truth at least once when he said "Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build a bridge where there is no river." Harvard Law Prof. Alan Dershowitz wrote "Lying, distortion, and other forms of intellectual dishonesty are endemic among judges..." He must know. He pioneered many of them. "The Best Defense" My teasing Dick’s Armory annoyed my Web boss at bit. We wrestled dirty because I don’t clean my house in the winter since few visitors get up to Point Barrow, Alaska this time of the year.

The ugly match led me to have a sudden blazing perception into the unreality of politics. Under the influence of drugs—I took three tums because I made a pig of myself after my stunning victory-- the so-what story of another ho-hum retirement begged this twist. As Boss Tweed said when the cost of building New York’s new City Hall catapulted, "I seen my opportunity and I took it." That sort of reminded me of the $3000 trillion dollars Congress appropriated to make everything in America 100% safe according to the standards of the American College of Plastic Surgeons and the National Organization for Women.

See my previous article entitled Retirement mentioned for Army next year the original of which appeared on December 11 in the Washington Times. Today, the whole of Dick’s Army retired en masse officially on the House floor.

I kept telling our "boys" (referring to the fathers rights movement) to forget taking congressional and court procedures so seriously. It’s like workers loafing on the job. These guys insist on ferreting out the weak points in judicial immunity to exploit and wonder why things still mudslide downhill.

There’s nothing more dangerous than when you’re right and the government is wrong.

"You’re no lawyer, Carlan, if you can’t speak like one so we can’t understand you without going to Lexis or Westlaw and doing days of research. They collect lists like lawyers and case citations. We don’t trust you because you’re too obvious to rip us off." They quoted from the constitution to prove me wrong. I quoted from the Soviet constitution of 1936. They would be dead if they tried to enforce their "rights" under it, if they mistook the velvet glove for the machine gun behind it. That reminds me of a run-in the humorist Stephen Wright had with a cop.

One time a cop pulled me over for running a stop sign. He said, "Didn’t you see the stop sign?" I said, "Yeah, but I don’t believe everything I read."

Judges and other lawyers practice the Playdough version of family law; it’s so malleable. For some of the best examples of legal rigormarole read a couple of New York Court of Appeals decisions on family law matters. Don’t read them as law. They are legal disasters. Instead read them for enjoyment, as if you were listening to Abbot and Costello torture the language in their "whose on first" skit or Yogi Bera’s malaprops. Laugh, we’ve all been had.

One father I know appealed to the court. He had to pay a Nepalese interpreter 50000 rupees to translate the decision and find out whether it was good or bad. That was after he paid his law firm $50,000 to write and defend the brief before the court. His lawyers hadn’t the slightest idea who won except they were sure they and the other lawyers had.

I remember before I went through the puree setting on law school blender, a judge--actually the most decent to me--started jostling me. "Justice Molloy, if you’ll come down from on high, we could pass the afternoon pleasantly playing "Can You Top This." But either you are tops in my book up there or I’m in jail. Sorry, much as I’m tempted, I can’t play the game.

Elected officials are another breed. The Founding Fathers created them as punching bags to encourage our "pursuit of happiness." Firstly, there are powerless to get back at us. Secondly, as Mark Twain suggested Congress is the only native criminal class in America. As long as they can continue robbing us while we laugh at them, they don’t much care.

Will Rogers explained America’s surplus of great comedians. "All we had to do was watch Congress and report the facts." One of his favorite Congress quotes was: "Every time they make a joke, it’s a law and every time they make a law, it’s a joke."

Too bad I discovered my calling so late in life. I could have been another Art Buchwald without the leftward tilt. Good political humor knows no ideology. Like a cartoon, it concentrates viciously on personal traits.

The only distinction is Republicans are more inclined to pomposity. Democrats are just more inclined. It comes from drink and drugs.

1. The Israelis, the British, the French, and the Somolis all lined up in the White House kitchen to warn him about September 11th, but he had something more important to do on that day.

2. A very sick man who had a National Security Advisor who he couldn’t understand because Kissenger, although he came to the United States at aged nine cultivated a German dialect no one else ever heard of.

3. Trent Lott is a Republican with a mission, to keep critical defense appropriations moving into the shipyards of Mississippi, to keep them busy building sailing vessels and selling them cheap to landlocked countries like Switzerland.

4. Warren Harding wasn’t a bad guy himself. He just liked playing cards with crooks more than he liked trying to grasp trade policies, like closing down the whole world with tarrifs not being exactly the best way to prevent world-wide depression. But he was the nation’s first environmentalist President. Well, at least he forced attention on the environment in the Teapot Dome scandal.

5. Hillary Clinton was so devastated by pain and sickness the cleanup crews of males were suffering at ground zero that she sent her daughter Chelsea to do a thorough inspection and report back to her. Chelsea called her mother a liar. Chelsea may decide to switch parties to offset Senator Jeffries of Vermont.

End of part one

Part Two on the Burner: I Ain’t Prejudiced, I Hates Everybody

Andrew E. Carlan
Farmingdale, New York

You can e-mail your comments to Andrew at acarlan@optonline.net.

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