Isn’t This The Kind of Thing You’d Want In Writing?

So now, via The Raw Story, we learn that the Republican Christine O’Donnell, running for the Senate seat in Delaware has admitted to a clear violation of campaign finance laws by using campaign funds to pay part of her rent.  Her excuse?  She got permission:

Her attorney maintains someone with the Federal Election Commission approved the arrangement, although the commission’s rules say candidates can’t use campaign money for their mortgage or rent “even if part of the residence is being used by the campaign.”

I mean really. This goes beyond criminal (though it passes through that territory); beyond pathetic (though O’Donnell has staked a pretty damn good claim there) and on into full bore comedy.  “Someone” from the FEC approved the arrangement.

“Someone?”  “Someone!”  You mean the non-witch impersonating me (and you, and you, and you…) actually had a break lucid enough to think that she ought to get clearance before embezzling that last dime — and didn’t get someone to send her … hell, not even a note on letterhead, say, but an email.   A text? Semaphore?  Anything.

Oh my.

Long ago the great San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen faced deadline on a slow day, and pumped out a dozen or so wonderful ways to say someone lacked that little something upstairs.  You know the sort: “The elevator doesn’t stop on her top floor;” or “a brick or two shy of a load.”  But for all the filler, Caen still came up with one I hadn’t heard before, that I’ve never forgotten, and that seems to describe Candidate O’Donnell precisely:

The wheel is spinning, but man, oh, man:  that hamster’s dead.

 

Image: Walter Heubach, “Hamster,” before 1923.