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August 11, 2004
LOOK, MA - OPPOSABLE THUMBS! (EPISODE II: SOVEREIGNTY)
Thanks to Jillian over at The Snarky Cat for pointing this one out... I saw it (or heard it, more appropriately) on her site, and forgive me Jillian but it was too good not to borrow!
Ladies and gentlemen... the President of the United States: listen here.
You know, I think I sounded like that in high school once. We were in Ms. Mitchell's civics class - usually one of my best subjects, but Karen Rush was in my class, she sat near me, and one fall day while Ms. Mitchell was lecturing about Senate procedure or something, I was completely distracted by Karen's cheerleader outfit (they wore them to school on Fridays during football season, just like the players wore jerseys). Suddenly, Mitchell noticed that I wasn't paying attention, and asked me to define a filibuster. Caught like a deer in headlights and barely able to tear my eyes off Karen's legs, I stammered something that I think sounded like,
"Tribal sovereignty means that: soverign. You're a... you're a... you've been given soverignty, and you're... viewed as a sssovereign entity. And therefore, the relationship between the federal government and tribes is one between soverign entities."
Of course, I was a high school kid gawking at a cheerleader's legs, not the President of the United States of America in front of an audience asking him questions.
The four saddest things about this story are: 1) I never had the opportunity to explore Karen's outfit with her in greater detail; 2) Once I started paying attention again, I could at least sound intelligent when asked a question I didn't know the answer to... but I didn't get legacied into Yale; 3) We've all been asked to believe that the man who gave this spellbinding answer actually earned his way into Yale, and earned his way out; and 4) The President of the United States of America is so intellectually incapable that he was actually laughed at in public for his inability to even manufacture an intelligent sounding answer.
