Release the Hounds!

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Long before Harry Shearer was known as a member of Spinal Tap and owner of several voices on the Simpsons, he had a long history as a political satirist. His public radio program Le Show has been a favorite of mine since I was in college (and that's a long time). Shearer has a newsletter that he sends out every so often. His latest had his thoughts on how Kerry's handlers mishandled him. I can't find anything wrong with what he says:

Somebody with the non-tin variety of ear should have told the Senator that you don't use the word "class"--as in "I'm fighting for the middle class"--in public, in America, in an election campaign. We believe in a classless society. Some of us are just richer than others, that's all. Bill Clinton figured this out; he talked about "those folks who work all day and play by the rules".

Somebody with an ear for coherence should have pushed the Senator into the Grand Canyon when he adlibbed that, knowing what he knows now, he'd still vote for the Iraq war resolution. He was then left for three months dangling on the platform of, "It's a stupid mistaken war, and I can win it better".

Somebody with a scintilla of knowledge of show business should have told the Senator to read the scripts as written. The adlibbing, when it didn't get him in trouble (see above), just buried fairly well-written speeches under a mountain of verbal styrofoam popcorn.

Oh, yes, and nobody now alive will ever see a sitting Senator run for President again. Especially one who couldn't be bothered to tell the country what it was he did in the Senate for 20 years--i.e., run valuable investigations into the Iran-Contra affair and BCCI, a bank that financed drug cartels and terrorism. When Bush taunted him for authoring only five laws in his Senate career, I certainly thought he was going to say, "So now the champion of less government wants more laws?"

Enough. I can't wait to see his beard.

It's pretty bad when the left's most common-sense advice comes from Mr. Burns.