Don't Fuck With Barbara Boxer (with a Side Note On the Need To Sodomize Bill O'Reilly With a Microphone):
You do not fuck with Barbara Boxer. The legends are far and wide throughout the valleys and cities and forests of California and in the echo-chamber halls of the Capitol: how when Boxer was first a member of the House in the 1980s, she force-fed James Watt trout from a toxic creek near Salinas - Watt nearly choked on his own vomit; how she brought a posse of Hell's Angels with her to meet with oil executives regarding drilling off coastal California - oh, how the bone-snaps and screams could be heard in the reception area, and, oh, how Boxer rode down the streets of Sacramento on the back of a screeching Harley, tossin' out broken cellphones like they were scalps. When George W. Bush's Texas was cozying up to the Taliban, Boxer threatened to castrate Mullah Omar for the repression of women in Afghanistan. Ask anyone who's crossed her and come out with some part of their asses handed to them: don't fuck with the Senator. Especially once she's gotten her teeth into the jugular of an opponent and tasted their warm, salty blood.

Right now, Boxer's still licking her lips at the taste of the flesh of Condoleezza Rice. After her big throwdown with Condi at the Senate confirmation hearing last week, Boxer's not backed down. She may not get to kill Condi's nomination, but Boxer wants to make sure that Condi's limping so badly that whenever the weather's too humid, Condi'll remember who gave her that still aching wound. Here she was talking about Rice yesterday on "Is Not My Stubble Resplendent" with Wolf Blitzer: "[S]he refused to answer [about the aluminum tubes]. Instead, she said I was impugning her integrity. You know, it's a very good debating technique. I mean, I've been in this debating business for a while now. And when you really don't know what to say about a specific, you just attack the person who is asking the questions . . . She turned and attacked me. It's fine; I don't care. But she has not corrected the record, and I worry about somebody who had a chance to correct the record who didn't do so." So there's Boxer, on Blitzer, tellin' Condi, "Bring it, bitch."

And, man, oh, man, the right wing media has gone nutzoid over Boxer daring to call into question the truthfulness of Rice's statements. The headline over at Newsmax (motto: "We're so fuckin' crazy, we eat our own shit") is the wonderfully comic, "Boxer: I'll Call Condi a Liar Again," which is not that far in insane interpretation from the Washington Times headline, "Sen. Boxer Takes Victim Role After Hearing For Rice." See, because Boxer says Condi attacked her, Boxer is acting as a "victim." Ain't that a cute use of anti-feminist rhetoric to, well, attack Boxer?

But leave it to Bill O'Reilly, a man who refers to his semen as "tzatziki sauce," to take an already debased rhetoric and toss it to the ground and shit on it. O'Reilly used his "Talking Points Memo" to launch into a vicious grumble about Boxer, whom he called "a far left partisan who has crossed the line into destructive politics." Then O'Reilly belched out a series of accusations against Boxer, concluding with, "The truth is that Boxer has no solutions to the War on Terror. And please allow me to pose this question. Is there anyone watching me right now, anyone, who would want Barbara Boxer calling the shots in the war on terror? No sane person would, which automatically disqualifies Ms. Boxer from being taken seriously." By O'Reilly's "logic" (and "logic" here would mean "If A=B, then B=turnip"), if, say, you go to a movie and you don't like the movie, you shouldn't criticize said movie unless you have the ability to make movies. Your movie criticism ought not be taken seriously. Or, let us say, you are a straight male who disapproves of how your female companion is sucking your cock. Should you have to become a cocksucker in order to offer constructive criticism or disparage your companion's fellatiotic abilities? Why, of course not. Sure, sure, you might be able to say something more along the lines of "No, no, do your tongue like this" instead of "No, wait, not that . . . okay, almost, no, sorry." However, no one would demand you learn how to bob on a crank in order to understand what gives you pleasure.

But that would be entering O'Reilly's world of horseshit, matched by the rest of the fucked-up attacks on Boxer as a politician and as a human being. Said Fox's John Gibson, playing the Rice-is-black card, "But ideology trumps racial progress in Boxer's twirly-gig world of Marin County, crypto-Dead Head, move-dot-dude Democrat politics." One can bet Gibson licked his lips with glee at getting to jack off on the air like this.

Boxer's seen the dive before. She's taken a few herself. But Boxer's seen Joe Biden, for instance, roll over before, on Clarence Thomas's nomination to the Supreme Court, but Boxer was in the House then, not in a position of power in the moment of decision. No, no, no, unless Boxer has something up her sleeve, this will all change nothing when it comes to confirmation. But those wounds will ache, even as Rice's appointment causes the rest of us unending pain.