Grandstanding

Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have battle in the fourth chapter of Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass." It turned out to be the same sort of thing that's happening in the Alito hearings in the Senate right now.

"Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoiled his nice new rattle," an event surely as significant as this, since Alito, an eminently qualified judge who is eminently willing to further the designs of the dictatorship, will be easily confirmed.

Still, Mr. Kennedy, the scrotum-cheeked Senator from Massachusetts fumed and sputtered, the unctious and oily Sen. Booby Hatch of Utah spouted sycophantic praise, the windbag Sen. Biden of Delaware treated the t.v. audience to a virtuoso soliloquy stressing his own importance, and Sen. Brownshirt of Kansas testified that he was born again, and down with this brother who promises to serve as a cat's paw for the administration's designs on absolute power.

And the judge's wife cried on cue, wiping her tears away with an onion, and causing the administration's cheerleaders at the Foxist News Channel to explode in a bladder-emptying spasm of indignation. There wasn't a dry seat in the house.

It was such a great show, full of the sound and the fury, that you'd almost think the legislature in this country still means something.

When Augustus assumed dictatorial powers in Rome more than 2000 years ago, he was careful to leave all the disused machinery of the Republic in place. The legislature still sat and made a lot of noise, but it signified nothing.

With the Dictator now appending "signing statements" to nearly each piece of legislation he approves -- statements which essentially say "This is a law until I say it isn't" -- you can stick a fork in Congress's ass, 'cause it's done.

People like Alito and John Yoo claim the Constitution supports this concept of the Imperial Presidency. They're lying, but so what? They know that if they tell the lie often enough and long enough, people will believe it.

As long as people are allowed to engage in that ritual of political masturbation known as voting every few years, they probably won't even notice that the government has been hijacked and the republic has given way to one-man rule.

That's what makes all the grandstanding we saw in the Senate yesterday so useless, pathetic, and less than what it was supposed to be -- an entertainment. For me it was more like torture.