Not Quite Balls, But Not Quite an Empty Sack: 'Tis a sad sight, some might say, when a male dog has been neutered. 'Tis a pity to see the empty space where mighty testicles once bobbled between proud haunches, below perky anus. Oh, yes, we say, there's good in the castration of a dog - no spreading of seed, no aggression, no chewing up the couch or the two year-old who won't leave his fuckin' ears alone. And how we still love our dismembered pets, as they lick us with less enthusiasm, as they try to lick phantom nuts but only getting a tongue full of air. For the truly caring pet owner, the fine people at Neuticles have been there for a few years now, offering you the option of cosmetic surgery to put balls back where no balls currently reside. You can have nut implants put on your cat, dog, horse, or bull - they come in multiple sizes. No, they don't act like real testicles, but they give the illusion that the poor beast actually has balls. So it was that Democratic Senators took to the floor of their chamber yesterday, not to praise Condi, but certainly not to bury her. (Rice was just confirmed 85-13.) And perhaps feeling yearnings from their phantom balls, so long AWOL after 9/11, several of the Senators not only dissented from the pro-Condi majority, but called the Bush Administration out for its lies. If we're handin' out the Neuticles, let's give a big bull pair, 5.75" each, to Minnesota's Mark Dayton, who finally, at long last, trotted out the word "lie," as in, "Holy motherfuck, those are some lyin' cocksuckers, and Condoleezza Rice's smile glistens with a glaze of spooge daily" or, in Dayton's own words, "My vote against this nomination is my statement that this administration's lying must stop now . . . I don't like to impugn anyone's integrity, but I really don't like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally. It's wrong. It's undemocratic, it's un-American, and it's dangerous. And it is occurring far too frequently in this administration. And this Congress, this Senate must demand that it stop now." Other Senators deserving Great Dane-sized Neuticles are Barbara Boxer, who kept up the fight she started in the hearing committee, saying, "[T]his issue of torture is one that matters. It matters to me for many reasons. The first is it is about our humanity. It is about our humanity. Second is that it is about our soldiers, who may find themselves in captivity and in a circumstance where they might well get treated the way we are treating people we capture. That is why the protective words here and living up to our treaties or obligations of our Constitution and international treaties are so important. It is not some vague academic discussion; it is very serious," and Michigan's Carl Levin, who threw down about accountability and said, "Voting to confirm Dr. Rice as Secretary of State would be a stamp of approval for her participation in the distortions and exaggerations of intelligence that the administration used before it initiated the war in Iraq, and the hubris which led to the administration's inexcusable failure to plan and prepare for the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, with tragic ongoing consequences." And let's graft on some cat-sized Neuticles to Jack Reed of Rhode Island, who said, "Dr. Rice's nomination recognizes and represents a continuation of a policy which has us bogged down in Iraq while Iran and North Korea continue to advance their nuclear ambitions and while a diminished but still dangerous al-Qaida continues to plot against us." (Robert Byrd and Ted Kennedy have such big, sagging, functioning balls that Neuticles would be an insult.) Meanwhile, Joe Lieberman continued his re-circumcising right there on the floor of the Senate by quoting Bush's maniacal Inaugural address. Then Lieberman decided to push it further, saying, in essence, vote for the poor black woman: "Dr. Rice, born in 1954 in the then racially segregated South, knew the sting of bigotry. No one on the day of her birth could have rationally predicted she would grow up to be the Secretary of State of the United States of America. But she was blessed with great natural abilities, with a strong family, with an abiding faith in God. She worked hard, as others worked in her time, to break the barriers of segregation to establish the rule of law to create opportunities. She has earned the nomination the President has given her." As the Rude Pundit said about Alberto Gonzales, fuck her story. Condi's suffering in the time of segregation doesn't mean she gets to create a continuing, cruel, murderous failure of a foreign policy. Man, Lieberman may as well have taken out his shrinking dick and said, "Look, Mister President, I'm cuttin' off a little more for you." Such a mensch, he is. The problem with yesterday, of course, is that while, yes, it's valuable to vent, in the end the Democrats were not unified enough to actually attempt to block Rice's confirmation, or at least to make a "strong statement." And with 30 Democrats voting for her confirmation, the effort yesterday was, at best, a set up for a real fight over Alberto Gonzales, who was passed out of committee on a strictly partisan vote (10-8). Right now the Democrats only have the appearance of balls. Maybe, with Gonzales and the Social Security fight, they'll earn the right to have their long-dormant, cryogenically frozen nuts surgically re-attached.