Senator Grassley Gets Religion

THE IRANIAN HOSTAGE CRISIS REVISITED: DAY 4 

    Waiting for news about Pistol Pete has taken its toll on all of us.  We’ve been manning the phones, sleeping in shifts on couches around the office.  Some of us have turned to alcohol, some to binge eating, some to video solataire.  At least one of us has had to increase his psychotropic meds.  As a diversion from the round-the-clock tension, we want to bring you this letter from our old friend Gern, the crane operator from Ohio (see “Bananas and Presidential Politics“)  We should note that Gern and Pete go way back - to their days growing up in Custer, Ohio (population: 207).  We haven’t had the heart to tell Gern the Pistol was taken hostage by a group of terrorists. We just said he went out mushroom hunting.

 

        Pistol, Gern here. Gern from Ohio. I always feel like I’m missing something so I depend on you for perspective. You back yet?

        I heard this Senator, Charles Grassley from Iowa must have Midwestern politics pretty much figured out because he’s decided to take on six televangelists in his spare time. Why six? I don’t know. Why this six? I don’t know. Why now? I don’t know. The six “ministries” Grassley is investigating are led by Paula White, Joyce Meyer, Creflo Dollar, Eddie Long, Kenneth Copeland and Benny Hinn. I don’t know much about these folks.

       My daughter used to watch “Happy Days” on WGN before she went to school and one day she complained that a creepy guy was on before Fonzie. Turns out that was Kenneth Copeland.

 

      Only other brush with this bunch is one time I watched Benny Hinn for a good fifteen minutes before I realized he wasn’t Steve Martin and he wasn’t going to put an arrow through his head. It was confusing to me that Steve Martin would yank people out of wheel chairs, but I chalked that up to me not keeping up with his shtick. Live and learn.

 

          My question is, what is Grassley up to? Why is it that the words “congressional investigation” are followed by things like “of major league baseball” and by names like “Creflo Dollar” (Just a by the way here Pistol, but Creflo Dollar is kind of an unfortunate name, don’t ya think? You can sort of see the Committee In Charge of Picking Who/What- To-Investigate-Next at their meeting and the Chairperson saying, “Well, let’s just start with folks named Creflo Dollar and work our way out from there.”)

 

      Maybe when they finish with this they could investigate why college football can’t come up with a playoff system, and how Martha Stewart still has a gig on the today show, and what about something that gives us a profile of who is going to see all these “Saw” movies so we can keep’em off of airplanes and out of Home Depot.

      Are televangelists asking for money to buy new cushions for their plush living room suites?  Of course. It’s kind of what the word televangelist means.

     Well, I’ll let you go with this Pete, do ya think Grassley knows what grandstanding means? Betcha a Creflo Dollar he does.

     

      Gern Blanston is a crane operator from Ohio. He is working on a congressional study to determine if there isn’t a more dangerous way for Shriner’s to raise money than to have them wander through the turn lane at crowded highway intersections.