Ted Kennedy calls Jon Tester “Mister President”!
September 6, 2007 | Filed Under LOL Feature Stories (satire) | One Response
While this reporter ought to be working overtime on income-producing efforts, she has instead been tuning in to C-SPAN in the evenings. I’ve watched the 2008 campaign rallies in New Hampshire and I can tell you right now that, unless my Gaydar is broken, Hillary will get the gay vote. Lot’s of lesbians in Members Only jackets at the Hillary rally. Okay, it was too warm in New Hampshire for jackets (although Hillary was burdened with one that looked like it had been retrieved from a Jackie Kennedy museum), but I am allowed to indulge in a stereotype here and there because “a lot of my friends are gay people.” Even though my Gaydar tracked a number of gay men in the audience, it was Bill who was wearing the pink shirt! Take that, stereotyping pool! What the hell is Bill doing sitting behind Hillary like a sack of crawdads anyway?
But I digress. Tonight, I tuned in to the Senate proceedings and there was this cranky looking guy in a horrid tie sitting in the big leather chair which, in our great legislative system, signifies “The Man, the big guy, or the guy who has the worst hemorrhoids gets the comfy seat.” He looked cranky enough to be suffering from the dreaded H problem. Anyway, there this guy was in a tie that spoke “Montana” in eloquent volumes, and the
venerable Ted Kennedy was addressing him as “Mister President.” Apart from the astonishing fact that there were actually two or three senators present to do the legislative business of this great country with its big leather chairs, I was amazed because this cranky guy in the big chair looked exactly like Jon Tester! The haircut! The bad tie! The glasses perched on the end of his nose!
At first I dared to hope that President of the Senate, Senator When It Is Useful to Me, Vice President When That is More Useful to Me, and Despot and Snoop all of the time, Dick Cheney had resigned. “Nah,” I said to myself, that’ll only happen when snow falls in Washington in the summer.” Hey, wait a minute! That happened last week! (Snow resigns as Press Secretary and Minister of Misinformation, August 31. The MSNBC story. . . )
But alas, Chene Chene Chene is still dancing in the White House, a building which, in our great executive system, signifies “the biggest guys of all, or those who rig electronic voting.” So what exactly is Tester the President of? The Ted Kennedy fan club? Doubt it. Anyway, I used one of my finely honed reportorial tools to see if I couldn’t come up with the answer. But Google returned no results for “Mister President Tester” or “Montanan in bad tie rules Senate” or any of the other useful and objective journalistic queries I posed to it.
I promise I will get to the bottom of the story later. Right now, I’ve got to go watch the C-SPAN coverage of the Senate Sub-Committee Special Task Force on Providing Arms and Military Aid to Despots Who We Will Renounce and Hunt Down Later On. But I swear on a stack of Congressional Records that if I find out that anyone sang so much as a single verse of “Happy Birthday, Mister President” to Jon Tester on his birthday a couple of weeks ago, I’ll break right in here with the story.
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“Mister President” is proper salutation to the President of the Senate, as you know. It’s also how one would address the President pro Tempore, the Senator who has first dibs on the high seat when the Vice President of the United States (President of the Senate) is not there. Currently that’s Robert Byrd, Senior Senator from West Virginia. When neither the President of the Senate nor the President pro Tempore is sitting there, the majority party puts anyone there they feel like. They’ll often get a rookie to do it, because it’s a boring job and the rookie needs practice with parliamentary procedure anyway. The rest of the Senators will call him Mr. President because he is acting as the President pro Tempore.
If you watch House coverage, you’ll see the same thing — our Representatives will call anyone “Mr. Speaker” if he’s in the right chair.