Leahy took office on January 3, 1975, when I was almost 2-years-old, and I am old enough to not understand youth culture at all and to condemn it as stupid because it’s incomparable to back in my day. If I am old, and I was not even 2 when Leahy became Senator, then he’s old as fuck. The odd thing about Leahy that I did not expect is that he is the only Democratic Senator ever from Vermont, ever. Not only that, but he’s one of only three Democrat-flavored men who have ever represented Vermont in Congress since the Civil War. This is shocking to me because when I think of Vermont, I think of well-off hippie types, liberal NPR listeners, and public skinny dipping at a family lake somewhere near Glover, maybe called Crystal Lake. Hard to remember because I was stoned most of my three days in Vermont, and falling in love with a hairy hippie chick from Rhode Island with a unibrow. When you are constantly high and cuddle underneath a scrap of tarp with a female in the ditch alongside the road for safety and warmth, you tend to manufacture emotions in your brain.
In recent years, Leahy is probably most notable for being the dude that Dick Cheney told to go fuck himself, and was one of the few Senators voting against re-authorizing the stupid Patriot Act, where Patriot means you let the gubmint know everything you do motherfucker. Leahy and Orrin Hatch (next on the list) are homeboys who co-author shit all the time, including some bullshit anti-pirating nonsense allegedly meant to protect copyright infringement but more likely meant to keep the stacks of gold coins on the desks of entertainment execs from not stacking as fast as they always have. Oddly enough, Leahy is also a fan of The Grateful Dead, which is a very vanilla “counterculture” thing for a famous politician to proclaim nowadays, and very unshocking to me, though regular people may be all like, “Wow, isn’t that neato?” For me, I’d be like “wow” if some dude got elected from Montana or something and was like, “Yeah, I’m a huge fucking Hank Williams III fan. I used to rock G.G. Allin’s acoustic shit too, but his rock stuff was too hit-or-miss, like Hank the 3rd. In fact, one of my first acts as Senator is going to be to convince him to stop doing the stupid punk shit and concentrate on the drug-fueled somber outlaw country, because this world doesn’t need more stupid suburban kids in black clothes with self-screenprinted patches staple-gunned to a leather jacket so much as it needs angry, hazy-headed, militant rednecks. How else are we gonna beat the Arabs? I mean seriously. All this sterilized Toby Keith Wal-Mart Supercenter television monitor overload of commercial patriotism is bullshit. Let’s keep it real.” Yeah, I’d like that guy, until he got busted reading The Turner Diaries on the Senate floor as a filibuster.
But back to the intricate tentacles of the beast, I have never quite figured out why Leahy was an anthrax target, although I would expect it might have something to do with him and Cheney being at odds in other matters. Leahy was probably a stubborn man who wouldn’t go along with the back room game plans, so they had to perform a little very public mock execution, showing the potential for just such a thing, to get him back in line, at least partially. That whole anthrax affair is another thing that was all over the news and now is just a faint memory, with a Maryland scientist taking the fall for it. I don’t know, it seems odd to me anthrax would be that easy to get without someone knowing. The immensity of bureaucratic procedures, for those who have not worked inside the belly of the beast before, is an all-encompassing and supremely stifling thing, like the worst southern humidity times three thousand. It smothers everything, and makes it hard to believe one solitary guy could pull off such a thing by mailing anthrax he jacked from within the bureaucratic beast, because no private entities keep that shit around unless commissioned by one branch or another of the Department of Defense anyways.
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