“This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer,” Will Rogers once said, a sentiment that dovetails nicely with Michael Ramirez’s cartoon on the passing of the gavel back to the grown-ups on Wednesday:
Ann Althouse notes “How Pelosi handed the gavel to Boehner compared to how Boehner handed the gavel to Pelosi:”
Byron York points out the difference.
One thing I noticed (and York doesn’t mention) is that Pelosi made a snide remark about the size of the gavel Boehner picked out for the gavel-passing ritual:
I now pass this gavel, which is larger than most gavels here but the gavel of choice of Mr. Speaker Boehner…
Now, my ears have been tuned by decades of immersion in feminism and Freudianism, and I say that’s an intentional reference to the phallus and the will toward domination it symbolizes. Nancy Pelosi intended to provoke disrespectful titters, I think — with deniability, of course.
And a complete lack of self-awareness about the visual reference — intended or not — back to the moment that cost Nancy her job:
Related: To paraphrase Henry Kissinger on the Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, does there have to be a winner?
Update: Hammertime!
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