My only question: How did they know it WASN'T Glenn Beck lunging for that burger?

"I liked the way he bit off that guy’s hand, and the way he did his business in the middle of the stage. We need more of that in Washington."

-- Jefferson City (MO) Tea Party supporter Gwendolene
Thomason, as quoted by The Borowitz Report (see below)

by Ken

This just in (OK, well, early this morning -- in the grand scheme of the cosmos, that's barely a trice ago):

Rabid Dog Briefly Mistaken for Tea Party Candidate
Receives Standing Ovation at Missouri Rally

JEFFERSON CITY, MO (The Borowitz Report) – A rabid Doberman Pinscher jumped on stage at a Tea Party rally in Missouri on Labor Day and barked at the crowd for nearly twenty minutes before people realized he was not a candidate.

The dog, later identified by its owner as “Mister Buster,” held the crowd spellbound as he barked, growled, and frothed at the mouth, eventually receiving a standing ovation for his exertions.

Gwendolene Thomason, 42, a Tea Party supporter from Jefferson City, was one of the hundreds on hand who were convinced that the Doberman was a Tea Party candidate until he was outed as a dog.

“I liked what he had to say,” she said. ”He reminded me of Glenn Beck, only furrier.”

The Doberman’s canine identity finally became clear when he lunged at a man in the front row and wrested a hamburger from his right hand, taking two of the man’s fingers with it.

While the discovery that Mister Buster was not a Tea Party candidate disappointed many in attendance, Ms. Thomason held out hope that, dog or no, he might consider running for office at some point.

“I liked the way he bit off that guy’s hand, and the way he did his business in the middle of the stage,” she said. ”We need more of that in Washington.”

This might usefully be read against the backdrop of the new Washington Post-ABC News poll. Here are some of the juiciest gleanings of WaPo's Jon Cohen and Dan Balz, in a piece headlined "Obama ratings sink to new lows as hope fades":

The sense of deflation is particularly apparent among Democrats, with nearly two-thirds saying things are pretty seriously off on the wrong track. The percentage of Democrats saying things are headed in the right direction has cratered from 60 percent at the start of the year to 32 percent now.

Among political independents — a prime target of Obama’s new outreach — 78 percent see the country as off-kilter. The percentage saying so in January 2009 was 79 percent. Pessimism was even higher among independents — and everyone else — during the depth of the financial crisis in late 2008. But for Obama, things are back to square one.

Obama’s overall approval rating is down 11 percentage points from the start of the year. The only other time a majority disapproved of his handling of the presidency in Post-ABC polling was a year agoafter another rough summer.

For the first time, fewer than half of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 give the president positive marks. Young voters broke overwhelmingly for Obama in 2008, but just 47 percent of those under age 30 now approve of the way he is doing his job; just as many disapprove.

Fewer than three-quarters of Democrats approve of the president; his disapproval rating among independents ties its high from a year ago at 57 percent.

No doubt at Obama reelect campaign HQ they're dancing on the desks over this exciting news:

Obama does, however, rate better than do congressional Republicans, his adversaries in recent, fierce confrontations on federal spending. Just 28 percent approve of the way Republicans in Congress are doing their job, and 68 percent disapprove, the worst spread for the GOP since summer 2008.

This gibes perfectly with the apparent reelection strategy: to pray that the Republicans nominate someone so appalling that the president, following his now-standard practice of positioning himself as "Republican lite," appears to just enough voters to be merely "appalling lite."

Meanwhile that peerless political sage Chris Cillizza went to town ("Vote out the entire Congress? You bet.") on a rival NBC/Wall Street Journal poll,

where 54 percent of those tested said that if they had the opportunity to vote out every single Member of Congress -- including their own - they would take it.

That’s the highest that number has been in the 18 months or so that NBC/WSJ have been asking the question -- and the clearest evidence yet that we may be headed to a “pox on both your houses” election the likes of which we have never seen before.

One of these damned polls, I'm pretty sure I heard on the radio, reported that something like 163 percent of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. One might feel more sympathy if the respondents hadn't voted these very bums in, and weren't standing ready, to judge by history including the excellent midterm replacements they chose in 2010, to replace these bums with life forms a bare minimum of twice as bad, and ideally 20 to 100 times as bad.

That'll fix the problem for sure.

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