A MOST LUCKY WOMAN

I think it would be headlines anywhere else, but when a bear climbed into a Ford Wind Star minivan in Anchorage and “had a old big party” it was just business as usual in Alaska. Judith Lewis uses her van to distribute food to the homeless, and when the newspaper delivery man arrived at about 4AM a 5 foot bear popped his head out the van window and at least felt guilty enough to clamber out. But when he realized the delivery man wasn’t getting out of his car, the bear squeezed back in and continued shredding donated coats and eating his way through bread, snacks and Top Ramen Noodles, and soiling everything in sight. An assistant state biologist repeated what I would have thought folks in Alaska knew by heart, that leaving food in your car in bear country, “(is) like leaving your purse on the front seat…Sooner or later someone’s going to smash in and take it.”
*
Well, on Wednesday the bear apologized. Representative-at-large, Don Young (R-Alaska), and one of the most arrogant S.O.B’s from the “Ancien Regime” told the Republican Study Committee that he was very sorry for attacking his fellow Republican, Scott Garrett, of New Jersey. But like the marauding bear in the van, he was obviously only apologizing because he’d been caught.
*
Just two weeks ago Mr. Young threw a hissy fit on the floor when the Congressman from the Garden State suggested cutting special benefits for Native American school children in Hawaii and Alaska. “Apparently, “ranted Young, “the students in New Jersey are trying to take money from Alaskan students…We are a new state. I have poverty you don’t even think of. And yet you want my money. My money. For my students that need to be educated….If we continue this we’ll be called biting one another, very much like the mink in my state that kill their own. There will always be another day when those who bite will be killed, too. And I’m very good at that.”
*
It’s always a sign of an outraged dickhead when they combine a whine and a threat in the same breath. Of course it wasn’t Don’s fault he was behaving like a raving dick-head. He blamed his recent prostate surgery, and his wife Lula’s recent surgery. And the fact that the entire Alaskan Congressional team, all three of them, are under criminal investigations by the FBI. They’re all Republicans, of course. And as required when dick-heads apologize, Rep. Young, cried. He sobbed, “I come to you as a weakened man whose weaknesses are greater then my strengths at times.” Ah, poor Don. Do you feel sorry for him yet?
*
Of course, we all blow our stack once in awhile, but the Congressman-at-large has a reputation for often being a dick. Congressman George Miller admits that, "Sitting next to this guy for 18 years is like sitting next to Vesuvius….I'm never quite sure when he's gonna go off, I'm never quite sure if he's gonna pull a knife, I don't know if he's gonna stick it in my leg, or what."
*
And what was the Congressman’s recipe for success? He copied his fellow Alaskan, Senator Ted Stevens; Pork, pork, and more pork. "I'd like to be a little oinker myself" he said, comparing himself to his ideal. But the apologist is most infamous for his transportation bill in the recent Republican Congress, renamed “The Transportation Equity Act – A Legacy For Users, or TEA-LU, so Don could work his wife’s name into the title. (I’ll bet she is now so pleased that he did that.) The bill funded the bridge-to-nowhere, the “no-where” being Gravinia Island (population less than 60) and the “to” being Ketchikan (population 8,000), and the bill being $223 million. It was supposed to be as long as the Golden Gate Bridge and 80 feet taller than the Brooklyn Bridge. As Congressman dick-head explained the bill, "I stuffed it like a turkey." It even contained funding for another bridge in Anchorage, to be named “Don Young Way.”
*
What a shame that all the publicity killed the project. But when historians speak of this period in American history, when a collection of greedy dick-heads captured our government and ran it for their personal benefit, at least Lulu’s name will always be prominently mentioned. Up until the TEA-LU bill, Lula was best know for producing two daughters for the Congressman, and for winning diamond jewelry door prizes two years in a row at fundraisers.
*
Now that is a lucky woman.
- 30 -
-