Senate is for the Byrds

OK, so I said I wasn't going to blog again today, but I was driving home and listening to NPR and they're blathering about the unique nature of the Senate and then I remembered reading thisfrom James Lileks earlier today:

I’m starting to suspect that the entire Senate should be abolished. Purge the lot of ‘em. Their drivel may be no less meretricious than their House counterparts, but it’s usually slathered with sanctimony about the Noble Nature of their particular chamber, how they’re the saucer into which passions are poured to cool. (By “cool,” they often mean “frozen to the consistency of a glacier layer laid down when the Bourbons were still a going concern.”) Such airs! They’re the only branch of government that regularly advertises its special nature and higher purpose – it’s like having a special branch of the Kiwanis made up entirely of bankers who announce, before each meeting, that they’re better than the realtors and insurance salesmen. And why? Because there are fewer of them. Well, there are fewer experts in quantum physics than there are Special Forces soldiers, but I know who I’d want to drop at night into a warzone.

I'll second that. And add that if the Senate were abolished we wouldn't have to hear from this guy anymore. Everytime something is going on in the Senate, this blithering blowhard is bloviating away about it--and the news media always feel compelled to roll tape and let him have at it. I, for one, am heartily sick of the "grand old man of the Senate," the great parliamentarian. It's getting so the very sound of his voice makes me break out in hives. And I'm not even going to go into his past associations.

Lileks is definitely on to something.