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Well, another campaign season has come and gone, leaving us with an aching hole in our political gut that no amount of turkey and oyster stuffing could possibly fill. But, after staring longingly at the phone for six straight hours on November 7, hoping in vain for just one more stray candidate robo-call to brighten our day, we finally accepted defeat, pole-vaulted from grief to acceptance, and began our traditional post- voting ritual.
The first step, of course, was to use our newfound free time to begin planning our politically themed Thanksgiving dinner. Say what? You consider Thanksgiving an apolitical holiday? Please. The Wampanoag Indians invented the rubber-chicken political fundraising dinner—they just didn’t realize that their weird-hat-wearin’ dinner guests were only pretending to be in the King Massasoit camp until their preferred candidate perfected his campaign message ("A smallpox-infested blanket in every teepee" wasn’t winning nearly as many votes as anticipated).
Anyway, our first (and, to be honest, only) resource for political menu planning is the endlessly entertaining "Congress Cooks" webpage, compiled by the fine folks at "The Internet Cookbook." After all, who knows how to prepare delicious, mouthwatering dishes better than a bunch of transient politicos who eat most of their meals at some high-powered lobbyist’s brother’s steakhouse? Still, the Virginia congressional contingent manages a pretty good showing, offering up everything from Senator John Warner’s succulent crab cakes to a surprisingly tasty Shenandoah Valley apple cake from Congressman Bob Goodlatte (and yes, we’re as surprised at you that he didn’t submit some sort of frothy espresso drink).
Of course, as you might expect, much of the culinary competition is, um, a bit odd, to say the least. Leading the weird food brigade is (rather unsurprisingly, if you ask us) Idaho’s notorious bathroom-stall bandit, Senator Larry Craig, who offers up something called a "Super Tuber." This gastronomical abomination involves—and we truly wish we were making this up—inserting a raw hot dog into a greased-up potato (as always, we leave the disturbing Freudian interpretations up to you).
But we could only use mass quantities of carbohydrates to stave off our political withdrawal for so long. And so it was that, after emerging from our tryptophan-induced coma, we moved onto the second stage of our post-electoral plan: scouring the Internet for any and all scraps of political news that somehow slipped through the cracks during the hurly-burly of election day.
And boy, did we hit the jackpot! Did you know that, through an unprecedented and overwhelming write-in campaign, Comedy Central’s very own Stephen Colbert was elected Governor of Virginia? Oh wait, scratch that. Actually, he ended up in a three-way tie for a prestigious seat on Williamsburg’s Colonial Soil and Water Conservation District Board. And he only garnered three votes. What’s more, the Williamsburg Electoral Board—after an exhaustingly thorough recount—revealed that the estimable Mr. Colbert really only received two votes, therefore making him ineligible for the nail-biting runoff election (which, in a fine display of constitutional democracy, involved picking the winner’s name out of a hat).
Oh well, so much for our dreams of discovering some truly earth-shattering post-Thanksgiving political poop. I suppose we’ll just have to settle for the completely unexpected news that former governor Jim Gilmore has agreed to be the sacrificial lamb tossed to Mark Warner in the ’08 senate race.
Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got some Super Tubers in the oven, and those wieners are looking about ready to burst. Bon appetite!