Consider the dog

Once you learn the basics of politics and law, it’s all same same after. But what two-legged mammal has ever learned the basics of being a dog? Nunuvus.

**Consider:  When thunder and lightning crash-boom upon you, trembling in bed, will politics or law jump up and lick your face? No, but a dog will. (Actually, a bunch of Trump appointees already have done this, but it’s not the same thing. Trust me.)

Now consider this:  “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes / I all alone beweep my outcast state / and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries / and look upon myself and curse my fate …”

Consider again:  Speaking of bootless cries and cursing my fate, could any human being perk me up so fast as a big dog leaning his head on my knee and looking up with his big ol’ brown eyes? Imposserus.

Dear Bob:

Will a dog ever desert you?

Bob: No.

Dear Bob:

What about street dogs?

Bob: That was not her fault.

Dear Bob:

Why do you like dogs so much?

Bob: Because I’ve known humans.

Dear Bob:

In many nations today, people eat dogs. Would you ever do that?

Bob: Why’n’tcha come onna my house, big guy, and we might could discuss this.

Dear Bob:

Are you intimating that if I did go to your house, you might slaughter me and broil my buttocks and loins, and eat them, and feed the rest to your dogs?

Bob: Now you’re gettin’ it. Whyncha come onna my house?

Dear Bob:

I thought this was supposed to be a column about politics and legal affairs. Yet here you are talking about slaughtering me and eating my flesh, and throwing my bones to the dogs. Have you no shame?

Bob: Shame? What’s that? (Here follows a tirade upon the Gaza Strip and Israel and India and Russia and the White House and the Supreme Court, excised from this treatise due to the Comstock Act.)

Dear Bob:

Is there a best breed of dog?

Bob: Yes.

Reader: Which one?

Bob: All of them.

Dear Bob:

Let me rephrase that: Do you have a favorite breed of dog?

Bob: Yes.

Reader: What is it?

Bob: Whatever dogs I have at the time.

Dear Bob:

With the assistance of what strange gods were you hired to write about politics and law for a respected online newspaper? A daily, no less. And, having climbed to what we must assume is the pinnacle of your, such as it is, career, why do you allatime write about dogs? Millions of people, tens of millions of people, resort to this page for information about the vital needs and problems of our society and theirs. Don’t you think you should cater to their needs and interests, rather than your own?

Bob: That’s their problem.

Dear Bob:

Just curious — has your publisher ever rejected one of your columns?

Bob: He did. The nerve of that guy. He rejected a column I wrote about Shakespeare.

Reader: Shakespeare! What could you possibly tell us about Shakespeare?

Bob: The Boss said I’d disparaged The Dude in a line in “As You Like It.” Act II, sc. 7, if you must know, Ms. Snoopy Pants.

Reader: “All the world’s a stage”?

Bob: That one.

Reader: And whom or what did you disparage, in one of the greatest speeches written by the world’s greatest dramatist?

Bob: The one where he says we are all born “mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.”

Reader: And did you deny that, Bob? Did you try to write better than Shakespeare?

Bob: No, no. It’s that word “mewling.” I thought he was writing about cats.