The American Spectator

Eminentoes

When my entry was disqualified from the Westminster Dog Show for steroid use, I fired Jose Canseco as her personal trainer and turned my attention back to the political scene. There I encountered a world gone from the ridiculous to the subliminal. Exhibitionist A is the Dixie Chicks, who were respectful enough to take their Grammy home from an award ceremony celebrating their disrespect for the President. In her day, you could not badmouth the good egg in the Oval Office without your elders giving you a piece of their mind.

Which brings us to a story about peace of mind -- for monkeys in Los Angeles. The zoo there is a place people go to seek prime mates; nothing wins some winsome maiden like pretending to care for animals. Not wanting to scare the monkeys with these way too complexly evolved situations, the management turned to feng shui experts to design an un-unsettling environment. (My suggestion of an apiary for the apes earned me a stinging rebuke.)

Surely you are familiar with feng shui, unless you live in Dixie and don't know any chicks. It's all the rage: an approach to interior design that fashions a flow of interacting images to give a harmonious feel to your surroundings. Applying this to animals is logical, say the experts, citing Darwin. Well, I'll be a monkey's uncle, or perhaps a nephew. Actually this may explain the extinction of the saber-toothed tiger: he got defenged and was no longer shui generic. In a way this story reverses Darwin; it shows you can make monkeys out of human beings.

Speaking of making moneys out of human beings, global warming is heating up. Finally, evolution is producing some opposable thumbs to vote thumbs-down on this insanity. Dennis Miller went on Jay Leno to point out that the global warming statistics are based on a one-degree difference over 100 years, which means we are ready to blow trillions of dollars based on the accuracy of weather measurement in 1907, two years before the first airplane flight across the English Channel.

And my new hero is Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic. My nickname for him is Mini-Vac, because he is always in the shadow of Vaclav Havel. Klaus told an interviewer he had studied the stats carefully and concluded global warming is a leftist hoax. No sane person would believe it, he says, only someone like Al Gore. So Klaus throws the phobic diagnosis into the crowd; how long before they call him a psycho? But we relish him and think he is being frank, not a hot dog. Yes, Virginia, there is a dissenter Klaus.

Additionally, the premier expert on glaciers in India, V. K. Raina, has pored over the evidence and detects no unusual changes in the Himalayan glaciers, contrary to alarmist claims. As they say in England, Raina has bunged a spanner into the manner of Europe's planners. If anything, he complains, we know too little about the status of these structures because we do not have enough eyes on the ice and the research is slow, even â€" you should excuse the expression -- glacial. You have to love these guys from India (no pun jab coming; this is serious), perhaps the last group of people left who both tell the truth and speak English.

Oh, and speaking of English, you don't have to. Speak English, I mean. Well, in Nashville, anyway. The mayor vetoed the city council's ordinance to publish government documents in English only. He feared that law would draw a suit because it constituted an unconstitutional restraint on his constituency. Apparently it violates Article II, which reads: "La vita loca trabajo mira gracias aqui hola Tomaso Jeffersonez." Trying to enforce such a law would be futile, just a form of whistling Dixie. That's what the Dixita Chiquitas tell me, anyways.

And since you mention futility, let me point out we have just signed some sort of papyrus with North Korea. The President says the agreement is a good deal, and there is a good deal of agreement among Democrats, which should tell you all you need to know. This historic moment, the "Dumping the Headache onto the Next Administration Act," is of a piece with all the other self-destructive self-deception we have chronicled here today. We prolong the ping-pong game with Pyongyang long enough to ring the gong and pretend we were strong. Just another hatchet job from the Axis of Evil.

Surveying this compendium of pandemonium, I remember why I went to Westminster in the first place: to try to shake the sensation that the world is going to the dogs.

topics:
Environment, Global Warming, Constitution, Law, North Korea