Thursday Open Thread

Welcome to your Thursday open thread. Yesterday was a pretty exciting day with the Prop 8 decision. I got polled last night! Some polling agency was really focused on Jack Markell’s favorables but the survey seemed to be probing support for a 10-cent-per-gallon increase in the gas tax for road maintenance funds and whether I would support cutting state workers benefits to “bring them in line with the private sector.” So, I expect these issues will come up soon. I didn’t catch the name of the polling organization but my questioner was from Indiana. Heh, one question they asked was whether I considered myself “Tea Party.”

Several commenters have been talking about Basil Marceaux. Here’s the Colbert Report where the nation was just introduced to Basil Marceaux dot com.

The Tennessee primary is today. Republicans in Tennessee have the choice between Ron Ramsey, who thinks that the 1st amendment doesn’t apply to Islam, Zach Wamp, who thinks Tennessee should secede from the union over health care and Basil Marceaux dot com. Between those three, I choose Basil Marceaux.

Marceaux’s become a sensation, sort of like those bad American Idol tryouts. Last night he was on Jimmy Kimmel’s show and he sat down for a long interview with Mediaite.

On the other hand, he doesn’t want to strictly be the butt of jokes. After speaking with him at length, I can say he’s definitely a character, the sort of which gives our country its character. A former marine, he has interpreted the several iterations of the Freedmen’s Bureau Act to mean that every US Marine is also a federal judge for life, and that DUI checkpoints constitute slavery. We all have our Captain Ahab-esque obsessions, and Basil has chased this whale through the courts for years. He told me he was even banned from entering a federal building for 3 years, which was used as justification to expel him from the Pachyderm Club.

If Basil has an overarching theme to his campaign, it is that most American ideal of correcting injustices. One of his campaign promises is to “give everyone dental,” because poor people like him can’t afford to have their teeth taken care of. This has left him with only 3 teeth, which partially explains his unusual manner of speech. Contrary to what Colbert and others have said, Basil not only wasn’t drunk during his TV debut, he doesn’t even drink.

He also told me that he attended Penn State, but then transferred to a non-accredited school that basically swindled him out of his Veteran’s Administration loan money.

While it has been established that Basil Marceaux is not one of our great communicators, he seems to deserve his metamorphosis from cruelly-mocked laughingstock to shrewdly-marketed, adorable eccentric.