Eric Cantor, harlots and health insurance--redundant?

Confession: I really don’t like GOP Cong. Eric Cantor. You’ll recall, he’s the Republican who claimed someone fired a bullet at his district office. Police say the bullet was just a stray passing by after being shot into the air and bounced off Cantor’s window on the way down.

My first reaction to Cantor’s claim was – he reminds me of a guy who would shoot off his own toes to escape combat.

Later in the week, Cantor blamed Democrats for being on the receiving end of violence. Reckless, he called it. Gunplay, bricks, spitting, etc. -- there is no place in politics for violence from the left or the right.

I’ve been giving this lots of thought. Here’s my working conclusion: maybe we need to change metaphors. Maybe our current metaphors are just too hot. Maybe we should have more fun.

Try this.

Instead of calling Cantor a whore for the health insurance lobby, perhaps we should say his harlotries have been paid for by his tomfoolery.

Politics, sir, is a mugg’s game. It is low. But not so low that you can't still cheapen it.

I stole part of that from here:

"And here, more than anywhere else I know of or have heard of, the daily panorama of human existence, of private and communal folly--the unending procession of governmental extortions and chicaneries, of commercial brigandages and throat-slittings, of theological buffooneries, of aesthetic ribaldries, of legal swindles and harlotries, of miscellaneous rogueries, villainies, imbecilities, grotesqueries, and extravagances--is so inordinately gross and preposterous, so perfectly brought up to the highest conceivable amperage, so steadily enriched with an almost fabulous daring and originality, that only the man who was born with a petrified diaphragm can fail to laugh himself to sleep every night, and to awake every morning with all the eager, unflagging expectation of a Sunday-school superintendent touring the Paris peep-shows."
(H.L. Mencken, "On Being an American," 1922)

Yes, I am fully aware that Mencken was a brigand. But he was funny while fiery.

UPDATE:

Damn. Some crazy guy was just arrested for threatening to kill Cantor and his family. Damn. I am so sorry.