So, some cow chip-kickin' senator from Louisiana doesn't want Mike Sullivan, the US attorney in Boston, to become head of the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms because Sullivan wants to make it harder for people to get guns.
Um, isn't that what the head of the ATF is supposed to do?
The last time we heard from Senator David Vitter (R-Brothel), he was jammed up in some prostitution scandal. After his name turned up in the D.C. Madam's little black book, Vitter apologized and said he had sinned. In Louisiana, they have a name for politicians who spend more time on hookers than on government business: The Honorable.
According to The Honorable David Vitter, Sullivan favors regulations that gun nuts find "burdensome." Leave aside for the moment that there is no place in the civilized world where it is easier to get a gun than the good old US of A. As Jimmy Tingle, the great Cantabrigian, put it, this is the only country where it takes longer to get a phone than a gun.
They say you can judge a man by his enemies. And if that's true, then Mike Sullivan is my kind of guy. Vitter is one of those true believers who think there are too many condoms and too few guns. Besides Vitter, the other clown holding up Sullivan's appointment is Larry Craig, the senator from Idaho who likes to sit around men's rooms, tapping his foot.
Vitter asked Sullivan to address his concerns about onerous regulations, and when he got Sullivan's letter he found it wanting. "I was disappointed in his responses," Vitter said, "so I am going to continue to hold this nominee."
Vitter's laughable objections to Sullivan are hardly an isolated incident in our nation's capital. Last week's farce that was the congressional hearing on the use of performance-enhancing drugs by Roger Clemens played like a too-long skit on "Saturday Night Live." It was another depressing display of the sort of partisanship that plagues us.
And to think for all those years I thought the R after Clemens's name in the pitching line meant he threw right-handed.
There is no question that, for the most part, Republicans kissed The Rocket's much punctured rear end while Democrats took an appropriate adversarial stance. But the blue state-red state paradigm does not adequately describe what goes on in Washington. There is also cultural partisanship that is so ludicrously evident with the objections to Sullivan's nomination and Clemens's appearance before the preposterously named House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. It's north-south, it's rural-urban, it's many things.
Before his appearance, Clemens did a round of meet-and-greets on Capitol Hill. It was classic good ol' boy, salute the flag, I'm proud to be an American backslapping. And it worked with some of the committee members, and not all of them Republicans. A few Democrats shamelessly sucked up to Clemens, while one of The Rocket's toughest inquisitors was Mark Souder, a Republican from Indiana.
Hey, maybe if Clemens had gone to Henry Waxman's office and whipped out an ACLU card, the California congressman who chairs the committee would have gone easier on him.
There is a blue-red divide in this country. But there is a blue-gray divide, too. After Representative Stephen Lynch asked Clemens tough questions about a disputed injury, Representative Tom (Don't Call Me Jefferson) Davis, the Virginia Republican who is the ranking minority committee member, said the South Boston Democrat had "given new meaning to the term lynching." If that woman on the Golf Channel had to apologize for joking about golfers lynching Tiger Woods, when can we expect to hear an apology from Davis?
As for The Honorable David Vitter and The Honorable Larry Craig, they should rethink their decision to go to war over Sullivan's nomination.
Make love, senators, not war.
Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com.
