During my life in Portland, I have either lived in David Wu’s district or in Earl Blumenhauer’s district.  I’ve come to regard David Wu as the least of Oregon’s five Representatives, someone who remains rather anonymous within a class of 435, while the other four have managed to attach themselves to pet issues.  But David Wu finally made some headlines with this speech:

“Now, this President has listened to some people, the so-called Vulcans in the White House, the ideologues. But unlike the Vulcans of Star Trek, who made the decisions based on logic and fact, these guys make it on ideology. These aren’t Vulcans. There are Klingons in the White House. But unlike the real Klingons of Star Trek, these Klingons have never fought a battle of their own.”

“Don’t led faux Klingons send real Americans to war. It is wrong.”

Combine this to Rick Santorum’s defense of the Iraq War by making Lord of the Rings Reference, and I have to now declare a moratorium of politicians attempting to make policy points with Science Fiction references.

The “Vulcans” in the context of the Bush Administration is popularized in the book Rise of the Vulcans, and apparently was a self-given nickname by Cheney — Rumsfeld — Powell — Wolfowitz — Rice — Armitage, etc.

I’m tempted to say that Wu has a point, but he really doesn’t.  Unlike the Real Klingons — which there aren’t any real Klingons because Star Trek is a work of fiction — these faux Klingons — who are Vulcans but are unlike the Vulcans you see on Star Trek — are chicken-hawks and avoided fighting the Vietnam War — which, best as I can tell, nobody on Star Trek fought either.  It becomes all so convoluted.

I don’t know if I want the real Klingons to send Americans to war, either.

Today in the Oregonian there is a story about a 200 pound cat who ended up stuck in a woman’s dog door.  Yesterday we had a story about a newborn baby abondoned at a nursing home.  And before these we still have the story about the dog jumping on the bus.

What the three have in common is that they are all going to receive a huge amount of would-be suitors due to their publicity, more than the anonymous orphaned cat, dog, or baby who lacks the back-story.  (Well, I believe babies are pretty easily adopted commiserated with the age — ie: teenagers aren’t; babies are.)  No amount of Patrick McDonnel annual message weeks about adopting pets is going to stop the fact that the majority will be put to death.  I am reminded of the story of the four-ear cat, (I think I’ll name it “Four – Eyes”) and the curious statement that they’re “looking for somebody to adopt it who will not make a special deal of the cat’s extra ears.”  I found that bemusing, because the very reason the cat was absolutely certain to be adopted was it received news coverage due to its extra ears.  Do the cat’s owners scratch behind the extra two ears, I wonder, or does that violate that there “No Freak Show” rule?

Namewise, the temporary caretakers are failing us.  The cat is named “Goliath” — because it’s fat, you see.  I once named my mother’s first grade classroom’s pet goldfish “Fluffy” — named when the class latched onto the name.  I don’t know what I would name the cat.  I do know that the baby is better named “Kathleen” or something innocuous — one would hope that her abondonment at birth would not be the defining trait of her life, hence “Hope” is a stupid name.  (You can more easily get away with such for dogs and cats.  Hence, I believe the dog should be named “Hitch”.)

I remember when Coca Cola (or was it Pepsi?) introudced Surge onto the market. They had commercials such as this one, a bunch of rambunctious youths run up, throw themselves in a barrel, and on the command of “SURGE!”, they, um, surged? by rolling themselves down a hill, to their destination… which was a bottle of… Surge, which was, apparently, as this commerical shows, the Ultimate Carbonated Beverage Drink.

I am briefly reminded of the sordid Cola War battles that took place in corporate underwritten public schools in the 1990s, which had one school have a “Coca Cola Day”, Homecoming Week-like students all jumped into Coca Cola t-shirts. One student chose to disrupt the event by wearing a Pepsi t-shirt, and there some legal curiosities bumped themselves in. I would like to think that student wasn’t particularly brand-loyal to Pepsi so much as Pepsi was the obvious conduit for a message of “WTF?” — though Pepsi stpped in and sent the kid a bunch of crap in the ensuing media storm. At any rate, Surge might have gotten further had the cola company had high schools do this barrel-roll to the Surge as a Physical Education activity. (Hey! It couldn’t beat that middle school “yo-yo” exhibition and assembly meeting, which loaded the school down with yo-yos such that they had to figure out what to do with them– which apparently do a 2 week yo-yoing for PE for the next decade.)

We are shortly going to have Bush unleash his new “Surge” product. At the moment, the public is not buying it. Maybe he can get together with the Coca Cola Company (it was Coke, wasn’t it?), and give away their back-stock of Surge at his “listening tour” — or whatever he is going to be doing here.

It is remarkable how many books in the “Current Events” section of a bookstore strike me as dead-weight.  I am slightly offended by about half the books’ existence.  I cannot quite quantify it, and the exceptions are sometimes not entirely apart from the type of book that I’m attacking here — meaning at some point I’m a hypocrite (albeit I’d argure only slightly so).

It is seeing Ann Coulter’s Godless next to the response of Susan Estrich’s Soulless and Joe Maguire’s Brainless.  None of these books should exist.  The first book gives us nothing and the other two books are diversions away from any real issue — the proper response to Ann Coulter is “Why should anybody give a rip?”

From there, the books fall into an even lower depth of meaninglessness.

In other political book news:  I saw a used biography on Estes Kefauver.  It was just under 200 pages.  Which seems appropriate for the subject.

I overheard a couple of people today.  I heard the name “Joe Biden” within this conversation.

No.  Seriously.  I overheard two people talking about Joseph Biden.  I never thought I would ever hear such a thing.

It bodes well for his future plans.  It bumps him up the percentile from 5 digits past that decimal point to 4 digits.

Have you ever seen a stranger give you the stink eye?  As a repsonse, have you ever given the stink eye right back, largely to cover your bases as you try to figure out who he is and what the genesis of this conflict is?  After a few seconds, you then withdraw the stink eye and get back to whatever business or pleasure or boredom you are attending to, as per not coming up with any answers as to why this stranger is giving you the stink eye or why you should care.

What if you meet up with him again?  What if this time he asks, point-blank “Why were you giving me the stink eye just then?”  I imagine my answer to be a bunch of stammering, with “You did it first!”

The conflict can escalate or de-escalate from there depending on a number of factors that seem only assigned to the fates.