Roadblock Blog

Ask Millie: Duck-and-Covering

[In which the legendary D.C. Madam maven Miss Millicent Mary O’Malley explains it all for you.]

Dear Millie,

Your good friend,
Greatly Vexed in Vacaville

Dear G.V.,

First of all, my dear, there’s no need to apologize for not being able to resolve in your mind what sense can be made of the Senate. You are not alone in this. Sense of the Senate resolutions are tough things to get through on the parts of many people, particularly in Washington and particularly in the early days of January, when New Year’s resolutions appear especially incomprehensible in the bloodshot glare of hindsight.

As for the survival of lame ducks, well, that’s a subject on which the current Vice President in Chief, Dick “Ready, Fire, Aim!” Cheney, seems to be especially well versed. After all, some of his most legendary hunting excursions have involved ranch ranges where the poor little pre-stocked target birds have been deliberately lamed in advance so that they can’t fly away when flushed. (Needless to say, it’s always their left wings that get clipped by the kind of people that Mr. Cheney would really prefer to a-shotgun, er, I mean, to associate himself with.)

Of course, the extent to which bills being held or not held might play into this process is not something to which we can testify ourself (especially not without being subpoenaed to appear before the Committee first.) If armed members of the government who have declared themselves to be inviolate and above the law of the land are involved, perhaps the reason the ducks’ bills are being held is so that cloths can be held over them while water is poured down their throats to make them tell where the other ducks are hiding all their WMD’s.

If that is the case, naturally there will be no public record of it, because all the relevant files will be sealed as tightly as those poor ducks’ bills were. The next time we have Mr. Cheney over to our house for tea on the patio we will be sure to enquire of him about this, strictly off the record of course. But please do not hold your breath while waiting for him to actually provide any answers to anything, especially if your own mouth is being covered with a water-soaked cloth at the time.

Mr. Cheney quite likely will not be able to provide us with answers to your other query about what whips are used for either, since that subject is more probably the province of certain other Republican political persons whom we could but will not name here, as their constituents in certain places like Idaho, Louisiana, and Florida might take holy high umbrage at us if we did.

If we do ever manage to find out any further information about these things, G.V., of course you will be the first to know. But in the meanwhile, my dear, please do not concern yourself with trying to get the hang of it eventually. After all, no noose is good news.

all my Beltway best to you and yours,
Millie M. O’M.