Raebert’s elephant is smarter than the G..O.P.’s. Way smarter.

He’s not feeling well today. Why he got on my lap clutching his favorite toy.

But it got me thinking. While he was snoozing, the local station that carries Limbaugh and then Hannity came on. Only Hannity wasn’t there. The fill-in was the morning person from WILM in Wilmington. She surprised me.

She asked, right out of the box, “Are the Republicans ready to apologize to Ted Cruz yet?”

According to Raebert, not every dog has the heart to kick ass. Cruz does.

Then I remembered. The same way I do. Open eyes and a perspective from outside DC and New York City.

Fact is, it’s the Democrats who are facing a Catch 22. They villainized Cruz for wanting to defund what immediately became a nightmare. How do you run against the shutdown when the shutdown was a boy with a finger in the dike sounding an alarm in a real emergency?

The road to good intentions is paved by Hell.

For the Republicans it’s just embarrassing. They’ll wind up quoting Cruz’s filibuster and pretending they supported it.

That’s how bad ObamaCare is.

Bad news? Raebert still feels poorly. He threw up this morning and spent most of the day passed out and grumbling on my lap.

I don’t feel good, daddy.

Maybe that will move some of you to comment. Or not.

He’s mad at everybody like us.

As I watch The Five, he’s right. Krauthammer’s not the Grinch. He’s a charming guy who is just somehow deeply sad. I have never seen him shift in his chair like this. I do know how smart he is. And I am learning what physical fatigue can do to, well, everything. Once again, Raebert is right.

He’s the only hound in the pundit world.

I know he has a book out. But it’s great to see him so gregarious and lighthearted. Even though you can see that he’s a sad man.

Friendship doesn’t save a man like this. Love doesn’t either. Don’t ask me how I know. Maybe admiration will take the tarnish off the shine of his genius.

Oh yes. He is that. Even when I disagree with him, I know he is that.

Have you lived? Then why can’t you ever laugh?

Nobody wants to read a whole novel anymore. The form died a long long time ago. But it’s still possible to experience superior prose in a few hours. Here are the best.

Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathanael West

Cat and Mouse, Gunter Grass

Notes from Underground, Fyodor Dostoevski

The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway

Hard Times, Charles Dickens

Master and Man, Leo Tolstoy

I used to think, well, never mind what I used to think. It’s irrelevant now. It’s just that I feel the need for someone else to read, or have read, something. Anything other than Philip Dick or Robert Heinlein. And Isaac Asimov and Arthur Clarke don’t count either.

You can find them all at Amazon and probably at Kindle too. Maybe some are free.

I enjoyed fiction once. I stopped enjoying it when I developed objections to linearity as writing technique. But now I miss the shared knowledge of the canon. There were a lot of us who had read the same books, shared the same touchstones of what we used to call culture. People who had read at least one more book than Atlas Shrugged.

Never mind. It was a fugitive desire. Gone by morning, no doubt. Probably inspired by all the fake sophistication of Red Eye. None of them knows anything, has ever read anything, or believes in anything. They’re just smart.

I want to shoot pool. Something real for a change. And quote Swinburne to somebody who knows what I’m saying as well as he can play eight ball.

Ever done a four wheel drift? A wheelie? Never mind.

Just tired of fake and hollow wit and wisdom. Not that you exhibit that routinely. But I miss the richness of life, the laughter and thought as well as the ideology. Forgive me.

Raebert and I are still disagreeing about how we see the guy. My view’s on the left, his is on the right. Maybe we’re both right this time.

Once again, Hannity’s trying to prove the obvious. And once again, he feels compelled to invite the participation of one of the most indefatigable Democrat spinners, Lannie Davis.

The president may have oversold the plan a bit. But it’s still a great plan.

There’s also a Democrat pollster who thinks it’s more important to fix the website than investigate what went wrong. And Yuppies who insist that the intentions are so good it doesn’t really matter how badly ObamaCare misses the mark.

Yada yada yada. But the Democrats are offset by the (as usual) outstretched legs of Kimberley Guilfoyle.

Democrats are stupid, but… yeah, stupid.

All is well. (Okay. Other people are saying other things, but who cares?) Sean is smiling. Let not your heart be troubled. He knows he can bring back the dead and broken body of ObamaCare sooner or later.

Even a poodle has serious skills.

What Raebert tells me, anyway. Hounds don’t retrieve. Ever. He’s a fan of the clowns who do what people command them to do. It astounds and mystifies him. And he has faith in The Guilfoyle’s legs.

Not much I can do with him. Sorry.

P.S. More seriously, the poodle proved worthy of his breed. He did something fine. Having called the 800 number for ObamaCare, he learned that the operator he spoke to got fired for answering his questions honestly. He made it right out of his own pocket (a year’s worth of income) and got her a job to boot. It’s possible he’s a nice guy despite his incredibly low forehead.

Yo, Sean. You’s a gentleman.

So Megyn asked a good question: In light of the Healthcare.gov disaster, any chance the MSM is feeling guilty for not having asked hard questions about ObamaCare before it became law? Howard Kurtz, the new Fox News media critic, was forthright in his answer. Well, he reported, the New York Times and the Washington Post have both run stories in the last few days asking hard questions about how well this law is going to work. That ought to put the kibosh on rumors of media bias. He was beaming like a cocker spaniel whose mistress just got home. You could practically hear his little tail wagging. Wow. Such journalistic integrity.

Then Megyn tossed her hair around and went on to more important subjects. Thank God for Fox News.

He’s got the Starfleet pedigree; I’ve got the Vulcan brain.

Yeah. We spend a lot of time watching the news together. We process it in different ways. Sometimes we watch on the iPad and his nose is inches from the screen, his super focused sighthound eyes. He’s sensitive to voices, music, he leaves when he’s offended, because he’s not as logical and unencumbered by emotion as I am.

But we mostly don’t fight because of the mind-meld. We just visualize things differently — I with my less accurate human sight and he with his infallible vision. When, rarely, I see photographically, I’m still somehow a step behind.

For example…

<It’s worse now that I have a truly rotten attitude and see almost everything as a cartoon, utterly divorced from any reality I would have recognized a few years ago. As I understand Raebert, he’s resisting that kind of reduction. Where I perceive only two-dimensional imaging, he still somehow detects life. Take Hillary. I see Cruella Deville, and he sees a living being, a member of his own family, however remotely related.

And so it goes. Maybe he’s right some of the time. How do you see Kathleen Sebelius?

.

But we were simpatico on John Kerry, I’m thinking.

I was wrong about McCain. I thought him essentially harmless.

The deerhound view. He’s a ferocious, indiscriminate killer.

My biggest miss. Here’s how I saw Nancy Pelosi.

The evil queen from Snow White.

How Raebert sees her.

Mirror, mirror, make it stop.

There’s more. Much more. We’ll get to it in time, in future Washington updates. But I’ll close with one where we seem to be convergent, although his vision is ever so much sharper than mine.

Wonder Woman

That was mine. Weak compared to Raebert’s.

Sarah Palin. He knows. I’ll try to do better.

Let’s transition to a wholly animated universe, eh Raebert?

Now for an update…

The president is closeted with Kathleen Sebelius to prepare her for next week’s congressional hearings.

Whatever you do, don’t crash and burn near me!

Meanwhile, the White House press secretary is doing his best to defend the administration and deflect attention from the president.

Mr. Carney, is the White House prepared to admit that the president has established a pattern of running away from every blossoming scandal — Fast & Furious, IRS, NSA, Benghazi, and now Healthcare.gov? Aren’t you Obama flacks starting to wonder what sort of sniveling coward he is?

Oops. Raebert’s not entirely pleased. I’ll have to get back to you.

Nothing to see here.

We’re just about an hour into the congressional hearing in which the principal software contractors are testifying about their roles in Healthcare.gov. All we’ve had so far are opening statements by congressmen and the four witnesses.

Interestingly, to hear the witnesses tell it, they performed their jobs as contracted, met their goals, and are proud of their work. So I guess the system is actually working quite well.

Who knew?

Somehow I doubt congress is going to make much of a dent in their jargon-filled testimony. But we’ll see.

uh, Ms. Sebelius, how was the gala in Boston last night?

Slurring and incoherent. Actually, nicer than usual.

I was going to cite some facts and anecdotes about his recent appearances on The Five. But he makes everything up to suit his own purposes, so screw it.

His much ballyhooed sobriety is gone. He slurs his words, he nods off when he thinks he’s off camera, and he can’t keep his hands off Kimberley Guilfoyle.

Guilty as charged by me.

Help me out here. I’m a big picture guy, not a lawyer. It’s obvious upon reflection that ObamaCare is supposed to fail and bankrupt all the private sector insurance companies. Which feeds automatically into single payer government control of all healthcare, which means the government owns your body and everyone else’s too.

But there’s not enough time for this to happen in Obama’s second term. He needs, must have, a third term, paving the way for the title ‘President for Life.’

I know that the easiest path is an excuse for the declaration of martial law. But somehow it seems too obvious. Except that I can’t think of a way more suited to O’s authoritarian personality. So, I guess, the excuse has to seem like an unexpected calamity. Collapse of the world economy in the aftermath of Iran nuking Israel? Collapse of the world economy following a 50 percent crash in the stock market and the hyper-inflation generated by the traitorous chairman of the Federal Reserve who finally stopped printing money backed by nothing? Another 9/11 scale attack on the nation that succeeds in spite of the valiant efforts of the NSA to protect us by listening to our bedroom conversations via bugs in our wives’ negligees?

Or will it be as simple as the sudden death by toaster malfunction of Justice Scalia, leading to a good-will Republican confirmation of Van Jones as his replacement and a sudden reversal of the 22nd Amendment in a test case involving the Obama Action Committee’s fundraising for the 2016 election.

Or maybe he’ll just declare that he’s running for a third term and the New York Times will tell us that any opposition is mere racism, and Eric Holder will explain that, once again, the Constitution doesn’t matter.

As I said, I don’t know. You smart ones need to lend a hand.