God makes them, but they find each other

Mr. Nearing and I have his-and-her colds (we share everything!). Zonked on Nyquil, we've been huddling together on the sofa watching C-SPAN's rebroadcast of Sen. John McCain's Indian Affairs Committee hearing on Jack Abramoff's wild and crazy lobbying.

Some of it is truly laugh-out-loud funny, especially the Rehoboth Beach dudester — about as bright as Jeff Spicoli — recruited by Abramoff to be a needed name on a legal document.

The line of seduction: So, you wanna be the president of an international corporation? And for that the former lifeguard got about $2000 bucks and, eventually, a very interesting day in DC.

Then McCain turned his attention to Amy Ridenour, president of the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative (what else)Washington, DC think tank.

"Why does her name sound so familiar?" I asked Mr. N.

"Croakangkcroaknufive," responded Mr. N, who has near-total laryngitis. But I understood what he meant: off to one of the essential guides-to-the-guilty: Gang of Five, a scary tale of 1980s Reagan spawn who mutated into a force that continues to fuck over the entire nation.

Sure enough, Amy Ridenour was there right at the beginning. Although she got cruelly suckered out of a leadership position in the College Republicans by Abramoff and Grover Norquist in the early 1980s, she stayed with the gang, true to the cause.

Nearly 25 years later, she's testifying before a Senate committee. She looks like the kind of zoning board member who lives to vote down variances for wheelchair ramps, except that now, instead of complaining about the horrible aesthetics of wheelchair ramps, she's claiming that she in no way knew she was laundering millions of dollars for Jack Abramoff.

Sure. Okay. Right.