Why Are Senators the Only People in America Who Take Senators Seriously?

Here's a fun little political pickle!

Senators take the Senate very very seriously and are very very impressed with their status as Senators. It is of course understandable that they do so, in that being a Senator is, obviously, a big deal. But it is also rather bizarre, in that pretty much the entire country thinks Senators are a bunch of clowns. The country, of course thinks this because Senators keep acting like clowns. And why do Senators keep acting like clowns? Well, lots of reasons, but one of the main ones is that Senators take themselves so goddamn seriously that they are apparently immune from recognizing themselves as a bunch of goddamn clowns. It's a pickle!

The perfect expression of this was the standing ovation for Ted Stevens, which made perfect sense from the perspective of Senatorial Dignity, but from any other perspective was completely embarrassing. And then there was the Democratic caucus's refusal to do anything at all about the fact that their colleague Joe Lieberman had, essentially, publicly and repeatedly mooned them -- and that they apparently saw this refusal as some sort of a "principled" poke-in-the-eye for Liberal Bloggers. Which was weird, because Liberal Bloggers were not the ones who'd been mooned. Talk about your convoluted concepts of personal dignity.