When Kit Bond learns a joke, he likes to milk it dry.
Missouri's senior senator recently quipped: "There's so many bad ideas in Washington that when I try to decide what to fight I feel like a mosquito in a nudist colony."
It's a laugh line Bond's used before. He made the joke earlier this year, during the debate over the stimulus package.
In fact, for Bond, the bug-bite simile goes back at least two presidencies. A 1995 St. Louis Post-Dispatch story described Bond's efforts to root out environmental regulations and other business-hampering devils. "Trying to pick out the most burdensome regulations was a challenge akin to a mosquito in a nudist colony," Bond was quoted as saying.
Jokes about insects and bare flesh are popular in the Senate. In 2003, John McCain said he felt like a mosquito in a nudist colony when he looked for things to criticize in an energy bill.
Google News indicates the joke is decades-old. An auctioneer's use of the quip appeared in a Milwaukee newspaper in 1955.
Bond, however, delivers the joke as if he thought it up the very same morning, between nurse-assisted slurps of his oatmeal.
like
dislike
