Visiting the Rust Belt

Big Guy and I had a lot of fun visiting the University of Michigan over the weekend. It's always nice to get out of Washington, with all the negativity that surrounds us here.  Then again, it seems just about everywhere we go there is negativity. Frankly, Big Guy doesn't get it.  Like he reminds all of us when we get down about the polls and the protests and the legislative losses, "Hey, America knows what it was getting ... well, except for the socialism and the debt, but whose fault is that? It's not like Rush Limbaugh wasn't warning them."

But up in Ann Arbor Big Guy really gets recharged. Back in the day, when Big Guy was nothing more than your run of the mill street-wise community organizer, pulling down a few grand a month from his ACORN grant, we'd travel from Chicago up there to Ann Arbor for long weekends hanging out at the U of M Alinsky chapter house, hazing recruits and giving the occasional lecture over the din to "The Nationale," which was played over and over again to keep our spirits up. Good times, Good times.

But you know, this was a bittersweet return for us.  The kids just don't seem to get it. They want jobs, and a future, and Big Guy just isn't into all that right now. He was more concerned about killing the other night in front of our friends at the the White House Correspondents Dinner, and making Jay Leno look like a douche. And this is really the problem.  How can Big O really focus on influencing the next generation, when he has to focus on day to day stuff.

Like an oil spill. This thing is really becoming a headache. Oh, not because of the toll on the Gulf Coast economy or the environment or the people. But because of the term, "Oil Spill."  Last month, when Southern California got hit by that earthquake, BO and Axe and Toes got lucky. They just changed the name of the location where the earthquake took place from MexiCali Fault to Bush's Fault, and the problem just went away.  But this oil spill deal is a real challenge, because none of us can figure out a way to change the term from "Oil Spill" to something with Bush's name in it.

As Axe noted, we have a few million left from the stimulus package, so we're going to hire some unemployed Hollywood writers full-time over at Commerce, whose job is going to be to figure out clever ways to work Bush's name into all of our national emergencies. We figure that should get us past the 2010 election cycle, and by then the economy will be going so good, no one is going to care any more anyway.