Dear friends, readers, and suspicious congressional staffers,
I have recently arrived in the great city of Washington, DC, where I will be spending the summer slaving away as an intern blindly hoping that one day someone will actually pay me money to come to the office for eight hours a day.
Frequent readers of The Quad’s politics section might think that this means I will be writing columns opining on the imperfections of American legislative politics, as is my habit. And I definitely thought about spending the summer locked in cynic mode on my route to self-satisfied nirvana. However, since I normally spend my summers relaxing on a lake in Northern Indiana eating barbequed farm animals and watching the Milky Way take its lazy path across the night sky, and am spending this summer working in an office without the hope of jumping in a lake at the end of the day, I have decided to do something less political and more fun. You know, for the sake of balance.
It is in this spirit that I am very excited to introduce what I will be doing this summer instead of whining incessantly about the state of American politics: a weekly installment of Foxy Congressperson of the Week.
Every week, I will choose a congressperson who I have deemed to be foxy using my own completely subjective measures of foxiness, present them (or, more likely, the interns working in their office) with a certificate and give them the opportunity to comment on this prestigious honor. In the unlikely event that any of them deign to acknowledge my acknowledgement of their outstanding good looks, I will, of course, relay their message back to The Quad’s readers.
If you are feeling skeptical that I will find any foxy congresspeople in a group notoriously populated by the oldest and stodgiest politicians in the land, I ask you to simply turn your attention to the week’s news, where you will learn that Congressman Anthony Weiner is currently embroiled in a scandal at least partially of his own creation involving Twitter, a cell phone camera, and a crotch shot of ambiguous origin. I am here to inform you that Weiner’s weiner (I couldn’t help myself) is not the only gem lurking in the annals of Congress, and throughout the summer we will discover those gold mines together.
And that, in effect, is why I have now forced you to read three hundred whole words of my ramblings while hardly describing one foxy congressperson – it was all in the hopes of convincing Congressional interns and staffers to let me in the door rather than call Capitol Police and have me thrown out of Congressional offices for being a stalker. Hopefully I have now convinced the workers on the Hill to take me seriously even though I am not, in fact, serious, and we will begin with our first Foxy Congressperson next week.
I can practically hear your anticipation through my faulty wireless connection!
