Thanks to the amazing skill Barack Obama has shown this week of how easily he can stick his foot in his mouth while trying to speak off the cuff, the country continues to focus on who is or is not bitter, and whether guns and religion and trade policy are just crutches used by small town Americans who can't get what they want out of life. 

In the meantime, however, two of the chief Democratic windbags in the United States Senate took to the floor this morning, with their charts and graphs, and decried how essentially the republic as we know it is in jeopardy because of an unprecedented amount of Republican filibusters. 

With the assistance of C-SPAN, it is clear that majority leader Harry Reid of Nevada and Chuck Schumer of New York, senior senators of their respective states, had senior moments today.

Here is Schumer, not today, but just over a month ago, March 6th, 2008, to be precise:



And here is Chuck Schumer, on the Senate floor today, on the same subject:



Oops.  Something doesn't quite add up, does it?

Here's Harry Reid from Leap Year Day, 2/29/08:



And here is Happy Harry today:



Why the discrepancy, you ask?  The Democrats seem to have a living, breathing definition of the word filibuster.  It seems if the Democrats block judicial nominations, Reid and Schumer count it as a Republican filibuster.  If Chris Dodd, Democrat from Connecticut, filibusters the FISA reform bill, Reid and Schumer count that as a Republican filibuster. If Democrats vote unanimously or near-unanimously with the Republicans to uphold a filibuster and beat a bill, as has happened on almost a dozen occasions, that counts as a Republican filibuster.

Harry Reid, despite the fact he has trouble with two digit numbers, also took to the floor yesterday morning, and made the following remarks about fellow Americans visiting the United States Capitol:

04-14reid.mp3

“Mr. President, someone wanting to visit the Capitol today, there is no place for them to gather. They gather -it used to be out on the East Front - now they gather on the West Front. And the people who work here joke about you can always tell when it's summertime because you can smell the visitors. And what we mean by that Mr. President – they stand out there in the high humidity, heat, sweating, and it’s really – there’s no place for them to go. The bathrooms in this facility are almost nonexistent. There is one on this side, one on the other side, both very small.”

Oh, how nice.  There certainly is no elitism in the Senate, is there?  Barack Obama thinks you're bitter, and Harry Reid thinks you stink.