archy

Stupider than Ted
Last week, Senator Ted Stevens brought shame and disgrace on the people and state of Alaska with his boneheaded explanation of what the Internet is and how it works. His words were spread across that very same Internet by my liberal blogging colleagues.

I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?

Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially....

They want to deliver vast amounts of information over the internet. And again, the internet is not something you just dump something on. It's not a truck.

It's a series of tubes.

And if you don't understand those tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your message in, it gets in line and its going to be delayed by anyone that puts into that tube enormous amounts of material, enormous amounts of material.

After we all have a good laugh at Stevens' well deserved expense, I'd like to point out that Ted Stevens is not the stupidest man in congress. He isn't even the stupidest man in Alaska's tiny three-person delegation to congress. Both of those titles belong to Alaska's only Representative, Don Young.

The English language has never been Young's friend. He is famous in Alaska for such coinings as "Pribilof's dog" and "bladderdash." Young hates environmentalists and has a temper. He has been known to make points by waving hunting knives at environmentalists who testify before his committees. When Mollie Beattie, the first woman to head the Fish and Wildlife Service, made her first appearance before his committee in 1994, he waved an 18 inch oosik, a walrus penis bone, in her face. His language is often salty:

Earlier this year, a group of students in Fairbanks invited the Alaskan wild man to speak about the GOP's "Contract with America." Young expounded on a number of his favorite topics, including the need to slash federal funding of the arts. The government, Young said, has funded "photographs of people doing offensive things" and "things that are absolutely ridiculous." One student asked Young what sort of things he had in mind. "Buttfucking," the Congressman replied....

Even though he was born and raised in California and didn't move to Alaska until he was an adult, Young cultivates a rustic Alaskan outdoorsman image. This led to his most legendary moment. In 1975 he opposed a bill that would have outlawed the use of leg-hold traps (the toothed, clamp traps that are a staple of cartoons). After a string of celebrities and animal experts testified to the traps' cruelty, Young sought to counter their emotional testimony with a demonstration of his own. Announcing that he was "the only licensed trapper in this whole Congress," he offered his own expert opinion that the traps were not cruel. He demonstrated with his own trap.

Representative Don Young set off a leghold trap on his own hand and stated he would leave the trap on for the duration of his testimony. He proceeded to describe his own trapline of 500 leghold traps. He set out so many traps, it was days before he would return to kill any trapped animals who had somehow survived. To the horror of those present, he described seeing a lynx who survived 6 weeks in a leghold trap because other lynx came to feed him. In the midst of his testimony, the Subcommittee Chairman noted, "I am concerned about your fingers. They are blue now." To which Representative Young replied, "Yes, they are." Shortly thereafter he removed the trap from his hand.

When I mock the politicians of other states, I hope that my friends who live in those states don't take my jibes personally. These are the people who represented me for twenty years. When I make fun of your foolish representatives, I feel your pain.