Shaking Up Washington

If Nature abhors a vacuum, it finally sent a message to empty-suit Eric Cantor by touching off an earthquake in the district of the House Majority Leader who last spring tried to defund the U. S. Geological Survey, which sends out early warnings about tremors.

Cantor is unlikely to be any more impressed by this 5.9 example of his own stupidity than he was in pushing the government toward default in the debt-ceiling debate. In Congress’ stampede toward invincible ignorance, Cantor is the undisputed leader of the pack.

But he is not alone. In the anti-Obama blogosphere, quake reports featured news that the President was on vacation and not in Washington closer to the epicenter to stop it while the British press, with no phones to hack, nonetheless described him as shook up and missing putts.

Meanwhile, in the other big news of the day, GOP presidential hopefuls were busy unlinking cause and effect by decoupling the President from the fall of the Libyan regime, harrumphing that he did too much or too little, too soon or too late to topple Qaddafi and, oh yes, what happens next?

In this news never-neverland, no earth-shaking event goes unspun, and the fact that millions of Americans were briefly unnerved by the realization that the world is not as controllable as they thought gets lost in the babble.

It may have been symbolic that, when the quake struck, Senate members in the Capitol for a pro forma session had to scurry to a nearby basement to get it done.

That should give them some idea of how the rest of us feel all the time.

Update: The nation’s capital survives the earthquake with little damage, except for a slight crack at the top of the Washington Monument. Can they use that detection equipment inside the Capitol?