That plastic “C”

Please indulge a family story…

So, years ago, before my wife and I had kids, we bought a shower caddy.

You know, those organizers that hang over the shower head as a storage space for soaps, shampoos and in the case of Bill O’Reilly… the falafel.

Anyway, we take the thing out of the box and do the three or four steps required to put it together and then we hang it up and ITS GREAT!

Everything one could want in a shower caddy.

This was surely Jesus’ shower caddy.

Only… there was this weird extra piece. A plastic C shaped thing, which had absolutely no purpose at all.

We stared at it… turned it over and then though “WHATEVER” and we tossed the absolutely useless thing in the trash where it belonged.

A week later, our perfect shower caddy started to, well… malfunction.

See, every time we took something out of the caddy, it would slip forward, falling off the shower head.

This thing was a fucking nightmare. This was the shower caddy of SATAN!

In our frustration we posited that what this idiotic contraption, that we never should have bought, needed was… well… a little plastic C thing to keep it in place.

THAT was the moment we came up with the Lieber family “They Do This For A Living” rule, which said, essentially, that these people who made the shower caddy do NOTHING BUT THINK OF SHOWER CADDYS and so… well… when you find a plastic C…TRUST THE PLASTIC C!

I bring this up as I remember back to the reaction to the various debates, where some of my friends, and some on this and other blogs, suggested that Barack Obama needed to hit our good friends John and Sarah harder.

I think specifically of the moment where Obama was asked if Sarah Palin was qualified and he just shrugged, said something nice, and offered that he’d leave it up to the American people. Or how Senator Obama kept calling Senator McCain “honorable”.

Many of us wanted blood and punches and a full accounting of what we all know is the truth but, well, Barack Obama, HE DOES THIS FOR A LIVING.

He knew that there’s no need to put a knife in the back of someone who has already shot themselves in the dark place from which they’ve just pulled, “As Vice President I’m in charge of the SENATE!!!!!”

Now, we’ve all seen the graphic of Senator Obama, staring off confidently from behind sun glassess; the caption reading, “Don’t worry. I’ve got this one.”

Yes he does.

Yes he does.