Unless I can stay awake long enough to watch John Stewart, the daily TV news cycle lasts about 5 minutes for me, usually from 5AM when I wake up and watch a little CNN 'til 5:05AM when I go for a swim. So I get my news other ways. Like my neighbor. She tells me the main headlines while we're climbing the hills early in the mornings. And today she told me that 4 ambulances were dispatched to Capitol Hill after gunshots, 4 of 'em, were heard in the garage of the Rayburn House Office building. 4 shots? Tancredo? Hastert? DeLay? Ney? Lewis? Doolittle? Sensenbrenner? It could be so many. Of course on the other hand, it would take 4 shots from a high-powered rifle to bring down something like Hastert or Sensenbrenner. I immediately banished those horrible thoughts from my mind. Remember Gandhi; remember Martin Luther King, Jr.: non-violence, non-violence, non-violence. And don't even wish harm on people, no matter how rotten they are. I stepped up the pace of our walk, though, 'cause I was anxious to get home and see who was killed.
Turns out it was just another paranoid Republican's crazy fantasy. Not that New Jersey right-wing loon Jim Saxton doesn't have plenty of reason to be hearing footsteps behind him. He's probably the absolute worst congressman from the state of New Jersey and if a tsunami of revulsion starts building against the corrupt slime masterminding the Republican Culture of Corruption and against the Republican rubber-stamp congressmen who have given the less than popular George Bush a completely free ride to inflict his harebrained schemes and disastrous agenda on America, James Saxton will be displaced by Richard Sexton in November.
No one is saying whether or not Saxton wet his pants when he came screaming out of the garage elevator in a panic and rushed back into his office and hid under his desk, but his silly outburst soon "forced a lockdown of the sprawling Capitol office complex... and had tactical teams wearing flak jackets and police sniffer dogs swarm[ing] through several US Congress buildings."
After being dragged out from under the desk by amused aides, Saxton reluctantly "admitted to being the source of the mistaken report of gunfire that sparked the mayhem amid worries that an armed intruder was on the loose in Congress, leading authorities to shut down parts of the legislative office complex for hours."
Embarrassed, Saxton suspiciously changed his pants, and then ran to the place where all right wing nuts know they will find solace... and spin: "I heard what I thought to be between six and ten shots," he told Fox News. "It sounded exactly like gunfire to me. It was not of a backfire nature. It was the sharp crack as comes out of a weapon... I dove back into the elevator..."
Although the House-- as usual-- was not in session, a debate in the Senate was suspended as a precaution and there were hundreds, if not thousands, of people affected by the security clampdown. Saxton's jitteriness brought on a "scene [that] was one of barely-controlled panic, as armed Capitol police officers surrounded the complex. No one was allowed to enter Rayburn, and at least four ambulances were deployed outside the building. Meanwhile, hapless tourists who had been sightseeing at Congress -- one of Washington's top attractions -- were required to sit immobile on the floors of the congressional corridors while police conducted a laborious, room-by-room search of the building."
Eventually it was determined by Capitol police that Saxton's costly panic attack was the result not of "between six and ten shots" and the "sharp crack"of weapons but of noise from a nearby construction site. "There were some workers working in the area of the Rayburn garage," the police reported. "In doing their routine duties they made some sort of noise" that frightened Congressman Saxton. Even without admitting that he had messed his pants and "without apologizing for the mayhem his report unleashed, Saxton told Fox television that the silver lining in the whole episode was that it gave Capitol Police a chance to shine. "It was a great testament to a lot of people who were highly trained and very capable of taking care of the situation," said Saxton. The police had no comment on that one.
Before today, Saxton was probably best known for his sleazy relations with crooked Republican lobbyists Jack Abramoff and Brent Wilkes and for a seriously misleading report on the estate tax he released to the public. It is widely known on Capitol Hill that Saxton was a regular at Wilkes' tawdry poker parties where Republican solons willing to play ball were rewarded with winning hands at the poker table and with fulsome prostitutes. Saxton's Democratic opponent in New Jersey's 3rd CD, Richard Sexton, has flat out accused him of criminal activities in regard to Abramoff and other GOP operators with whom Saxton is close.
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