RINO Sightings for Feb 19, 2007 - The Dashiell Hammett edition

The night was black as ink and cold, the kind of cold that makes a man wish he had a bottle of applejack and someone to drink it with.  I was waiting.  Just waiting.  Stakeouts are about the most boring thing you can do when you’re a gumshoe, but that’s the job, so we do it.  I knew that tomorrow I was hosting the RINO Sightings, but tonight - tonight it was just me, the night air and the job.

In order to fight the night air, I brought a thermos of strong, black coffee with me.  It was the kind of coffee you read about in detective novels, the kind that could put hair on your chest and strip the paint off your car.  As I raised the cup to my lips, suddenly a voice rang out in the night!  I jumped, spilling the hot joe all over my best wool trousers.  “WHY?” the voice cried out, “WHY DOES IT TAKE SO LONG TO GET OFF THE GROUND AT THE AIRPORT?” “Mister” I said, “You need to calm down and go read Dan’s post at Searchlight Crusade.  He was an air traffic controller for 12 years and he’s got the inside dope, the real skinny.”

With that crisis averted, I turned back to sitting.  Watching.  Waiting.  Thinking about a woman.  Of course there’s a woman.  There’s always a woman.  This one was the cat’s meow; smart, sharp as a tack and ten kinds of gorgeous.  Eyes that could make a man sign over the deed to his house and then ask if there was anything else he could get for her.  Her name was Kiran Chetry, and nobody knew more about her than Digger.  He knew when she was leaving Fox News.  He knew when she was spotted on CNN.  He knew everything about her.  I bet he even knew what size dress she wore.  I wanted to know that too, but the night just wasn’t going to be that kind to me.

And so I waited.

I started to feel a darkness come over me.  Not the nighttime, that had already swallowed me whole and spit me back out to freeze.  No, this was more like a humorless funk, the kind of feeling you get when even a clown falling into a vat of pudding while wearing a three piece suit wouldn’t get a chuckle out of you.  I felt a little like Garrison Keillor doing his crotchety old man routine talking about Rudy Giuliani.  My buddy Eric at Classical Values told me all about it; about how Keillor seems obsessed with the fact that Rudy has done the whole “dress in drag and crack up the fellas” routine.  What I wanna know is who hasn’t?  if I had a nickel for every time I threw on a pretty frock to crack up the boys, I wouldn’t be out here shivering like a newborn colt at Christmas time.

Unfortunately for me, here is exactly where I was, and the coffee was running low.  All I could think about was other ways to keep warm.  Running.  A nice fire.  Dames.  It always comes back to the dames, doesn’t it?  Not every thought about dames is good, though.  Lately I’d been having some pretty negative thoughts about one Mrs. Nancy Pelosi, the “Honorable” Speaker of The House.  She’s not the kind of woman that inspires a man to warmth.  In fact, she seems to be inspiring her merry band of misfits and general unsavory characters to further disrespecting our boys.  The GIs.  The ones that go Over There so we don’t have to.  Everywhere we turn lately, it seems that one of Pelosi’s Pessimists is trying to break the spirits of our men and women in tan and camo.  Dane - you know, the guy that runs DANEgerus - is always telling me about it, and this week has been no exception.  He gathers information from all over and consolidates it for me.  He even wrote it up for me this week in a report titled Fardh Al-Qanoon.  Now I don’t know exactly what that means, but I know it rhymes with poltroon and that’s what that bunch is.

I know I’m not the smartest guy that ever came down the pike.  To me, brains are something that get knocked around when a guy owes me money.  Or worse, when I owe somebody else money.  Just because I’m not Einstein or Oppenheimer doesn’t mean I don;t know when someone’s being real low-class chump.  Take this story I read earlier today by Mark Coffey at Decision ‘08.  Charles Schumer is determined to create a Vietnam-like quagmire regardles sof how it affects the troops, the war or the country.  There’s only one thing to say about a low-down snake in the grass like that, and I’m still a little civilized, so I won’t be saying it out loud.  Just know that when I finally get Schumer in these two hands, he’s going to be missing one of his exit holes...it’ll be plugged up with my shoe.

Sometimes I wonder if I’m chicken too, just sitting here waiting for something to happen instead of charging up there with both guns blazing.  Then the cold wind reminds me that the heater is broken in this jalopy and my coat is not as new as it used to be.  It’s downright Arctic out there, and my thoughts wander to the latest in scientific-type religions; Global Warming.  I wish I could get some of it right now.  I’d kill a man in cold blood right now for some balmy temperatures and a good amount of humidity.  Instead I find out from my pal Don Surber that this is the Coldest. February. Ever. That’s great.  Just great.  This job better be worth it.

Most jobs aren’t.  Most jobs are like choking down a bad tonic the pharmacist recommended for that racking cough that just won’t go away; it’s something you do because ya gotta, not because ya wanna.  Of course not all jobs are ones you don’t want to do.  Sometimes - and in this crazy world you gotta take ‘em as they come - a job comes along that is both something that needs doing and something you can be proud of for having done.  Take the story of how the Phillipine government hunted down Islamic terrorists.  Barry at enveranche told me that one, and on a night like this, when my only comfort is a now-cold thermos of coffee, a barely-working streetlamp and the sound of distant traffic, I’ll take all the good news I can get.

News is funny like that.  Good news, bad news, news you don’t care about.  News you would die to hear.  Then there’s news that just isn’t, like this story about an utterly meaningless and confusing poll.  I’m with Jennifer on this; unless they’re telling me that most Americans want to vote for the Kaiser or have declared that steak is the work of the devil, just leave the polls to the pollsters.  Regular Joes don’t need a poll to tell ‘em what to think or who to vote for.  That’s what our friends and family are for.

All this thinking about elections and politics is setting my nerves on edge, like a tightrope walker in a hurricane.  I root around in the glove box hoping to find the remnants of a pint and come up empty.  Oh well.  This is just not turning out to be my night.  And there’s just no getting away from the 2008 elections.  In fact, Fred - he’s the guy who has the office right across the hall from mine - was just telling me the other day all about the front-runners in the Republican field of candidates.  I still don’t know what to think.

One thing I know down to the tips of my wingtips is that all this waiting and watching would be easier if I had something with me to pass the time.  I hear that one day the bigwigs at Consolidated Electronications Unlimited will try to sell us all a magic little box that can let you carry around music and television and that anyone, even a John Q. Public type like you and me will be able to make shows and songs and anything else we want and share them with each other.  Down at the club, this character that calls himself Bloodspite was talking about kids - children, mind you! - that do these things, and about all sorts of futuristic technology stuff.  It boggles the mind, the idea of these “video Podcasts” he’s always talking about.  A palooka like me is just plumb out of his depth when it comes to this jibber-jabber. Just the very idea makes me feel like a skid row bum trying to get a meal at The Ritz.

Still, I sure would like to have something funny to watch on a night like this.  The good Lord knows it wouldn’t be that Fox Half-Hour News Hour show, though.  I haven’t seen anything that unfunny since Jerry McGillicutty beat his wife in the middle of Thirteenth Avenue and I had to shoot him dead just to get him to stop.  It was so unfunny it made Wolf Blitzer look like Stephen Colbert.  What I’m trying to say is it was not the kind of thing you would want to pass an evening watching.  It was more the kind of thing that makes you want to pass your dinner out the entrance ramp.

Dinner.  There’s something I wish I had.  All that’s left are two strips of stale crust and a soggy tomato slice.  That, and the wind.  The cold, biting wind that keeps reminding me that I’m on the job, that I’m here for a reason.

And so I wait.

Posted by JimK at 08:10 PM on February 19, 2007
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