Monday, January 09, 2006

Sunday Afternoon Politics

Before the rise of the blogosphere, before Fox News, before the Internet if you wanted to get into a really good political tussle on a Sunday afternoon you had to play cards with your relatives.

Every family has a schism of some sort when it comes to what we now call red vs blue and my family is no different. One of my cousins is a sucessful businessman, a former player in the Thompson and Bush 41 arenas and a good card player. We started off yesterday with a short round of dancing around the Governor's race and came to the agreement that the GOP primary would be almost as ugly as homemade soap and that the general election would be worse.

After the preliminaries were out of the way we danced over to 2008. He said that he'd probably jump on the Giuliani horse early and I said that I wasn't ready to jump but that Feingold looked strong through the long glass. Then I pulled the Joker of wild-ass provocation out... I said that it wouldn't matter anyway, that we'd have an attack on the Sear's Tower before September so that the Fed could suspend elections and just prop George 43 up for the duration. His reaction was not the one I'd hoped for.

Nothing. No sputtering. No laughter. No nothing. Just the gentle flap of cards on a plastic tablecloth. My brother wasn't any help. "What's up with the Sear's Tower?" Ah, well. You can't have all winners. I couldn't draw a rise with the most idiotic assertion I could fabricate. Maybe I'll have to start thinking outside the box.

We got back to the task at hand and came to the sorry conclusion that it would most likely fall to Rudy and Hillary on the basis that all the country is essentially the same as NYC anyway. I just couldn't resist one last toss. "What about Feingold vs. Mitt Romney? Would a Jew running against a Mormon make James Dobson's head explode? Could you support that?" He just smiled and trumped my Ace.

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