Ahoy hoy, Wizbangers.  What's shaking?  I know it's been a long time since I rapped at ya, but I been tap dancing in a minefield since fall.  More than anything it's walking out of the office after the sun has set and driving home in the dark.  That and just feeling lazy, I reckon.

All malaise aside though, Obama and the Democrats have begun to seriously bore me.  I mean, if you compared sitting at the keyboard sniping at their foibles to shooting fish in a barrel then you're vastly underestimating the actual logistics and act of shooting fish in a barrel.  You've got to get a barrel and fish.  You need somewhere outside the city limits where it's legal to discharge a firearm.  You'd need a scaffolding of some sort on which to stand so as to shoot down into the barrel (assuming the barrel is rented, naturally).  Don't even get me started on refraction.  All in all a total pain in the arse.

But the murderous act in Tuscon has woken me from my slumber to rally together with my fellow Americans in casting about uneducated conclusions about what motivated Jared Loughner.

Of course, that's the kind of thing that would make me look like an idiot.  So I won't.  But it could be fun since it's limited only by my imagination.  If I hadn't been putzing around in the garage all day and grilling that sirloin strip roast Saturday I could have gotten out in front of this thing and quite possibly scored some rhetorical points against some person or people that rub me the wrong way.

Honestly, that's the kind of crap that makes me just want to drop out and tune out politics altogether.  Is that what's going on?  A conscious effort to make politics so spectator-unfriendly that normal people just give up?  I've got a very, very high threshold for offensiveness, but leveraging victims of a massacre for political advantage before the bodies are even in the morgue kinda makes me feel that way.

I actually pity the people who need to find a way to make political hay out of what happened.  That's one White House staff meeting I wouldn't want to chair.  But someone has to.  I'd say avoid the vitriol/climate of hate bit and instead focus on how Obamacare - when fully implemented - would ensure the shooter could have gotten the help he may have needed.  Plus a common sense call to close gun control law loopholes.  We'll see what they come up with.

Less pitiable are the Jame Gumbs of the journalistic and blogging world sewing together their narratives from the pelts of their political enemies.  It's got to be tough sitting around in anticipation that the next crackpot will be the crackpot with a Gadsden flag and Tea Party Manifesto in his weapon-stockpiled Unabomber style shack.  I feel your pain.  I've been pining for that next Cowboys Super Bowl win since 1995.  And then there's all those lottery tickets that never come through.

Mom's basement is technically underground, you know.