Weenie Wars | Deep End | Salt Lake City Weekly

Weenie Wars 

Our boys in Washington aren't playing fair

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China has lately been menaced by swarms of super-size hornets, known as brown-and-gold Asian giants. The largest species of hornet in the known world, the Vespa mandarinia is several inches long and comes equipped with a stinger the size of a stiletto.

The United States of America, similarly, has been menaced by a swarm of miniature Weenies known as Republican members of Congress. (There is a Democrat or two among the congressional Weenies, including one from the state of Utah, but they are so insignificant that not even the official Weenies of the GOP take much notice of them.) The smallest (in terms of moral stature) species of Weenie in the world, Gopus weenius, comes equipped with a tiny brain, an inflated sense of himself (herself, in the case of the honorable congressperson and Tea Partier from Minnesota, the lovely Michele Bachmann) and an utter disregard for the welfare of the nation.

Unlike the buzzing brown-and-gold Asian giant hornets, the vast majority of GOP congressional Weenies are sedentary and pasty. The unpasty exception is the orange-tinted golfer and frontman for the Weenies, who goes by the curious name of John Boner and calls himself speaker of the house. Lacking a stinger in his tail, speaker Boner relies on his venomous blathering, which frequently leaves him wet around the mouth.

It is universally acknowledged that the biggest of the Weenies is a mutation from Texas, the snarly bedtime-story teller and devotee of Ashton Kutcher, Sen. Ted Oooze from Texas. Like his brother Weenie John Boner, Sen. Oooze is frequently observed wiping tell-tale moisture from his mouth and chin region. Unlike his brother Boner, who always looks like he has failed for the third time to blast his ball from the greenside bunker, Oooze doesn’t seem to be in danger of detonating.

Instead, Oooze has the oily self-possession of a snake-oil salesman, or more accurately, the self-righteous certainty of a televangelist on a mission from God. Like Weenies the world over, Oooze professes noble motives: Just as the sweaty preacher wants to save your soul from the clutches of the devil, oily Oooze wants to save the soul of our great nation from the scourge of Obamacare. (Of course, as far as Weenies are concerned, Obama’s Affordable Care Act should be called Satanic Care.)

We all know, however, that Oooze, as a certifiable Weenie, doesn’t give a well-laundered shirt for the soul of our nation. He clothes himself in patriotism to advance the love of his life and his No. 1 cause: Sen. Ted Oooze. When Oooze delivered his marathon bedtime tale, he was the happiest man on earth, despite the fact that his five o’clock shadow was getting heavier by the hour and his burgeoning bladder was in danger of exercising its own nuclear option.

It is telling that now that the government is shut down, the smooth-talking Señor Oooze is keeping a very low profile. Or it may just be that his cruelly stretched bladder is enjoying a well-deserved recuperation.
Here in Utah, our Weenie contingent is also lying low, despite the fact that weenification plays well among the locals. Utah’s biggest Weenie, the machine-like Mike Lee, initially let his guard down and proudly exposed himself as a true-blue clueless Weenie: I’m working hard, he announced, and will not “donate” my paycheck to charity, as the other Weenies promised to do. Soon, however, his handlers intervened and issued a weenification denying, in true Weenie fashion, that he had ever said such a thing. And our blue-dog Democrat Weenie momentarily weenied things up by executing a nifty doublespeak in which he claimed he was voting to shut down the government because he didn’t want to shut it down.

As should be expected, the local television news, now that they are no longer in the news business, are playing the Weenies’ game, reporting the government shutdown as if it were just another example of Washington gridlock, with both sides to blame, pointing fingers at one another instead of growing up and getting things done.

Our six congressional Weenies (five Republicans and one Democrat) can blame Obama for “refusing to negotiate,” when the reality is that the Weenies are refusing to play by the rules and respect the law that has been passed. But the Weenies have their own playbook, which is written in Orwellian Doublespeak, the syntax of which allows you to accuse the other side of exactly what you yourselves are doing. 

D.P. Sorensen writes a satire column for City Weekly.

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