All Intensive Purposes

I'll never forget Dionne at that Cato reception last summer. I was standing there with Bob Reich, just yucking it up about John Derbyshire's rumored penchant for homo-erotic slash fiction or some other throwaway gossip, and in strolls Dionne in that faux green fur he loves, and that Isaac Hayes fedora.

"Eege, what's going on?" asked Bob, amused. "Jus' keepin' it real n' shit," came Dionne's standard response. Something was clearly bothering him, though, because he was clearly irritated. "Why I got to have all these ho's up in my grill n' shit?" E.J. eventually confessed. "Every muh-fuhing time she rolls around, that b*tch Nicole Wallace got to be all on my junk, man, and I can't take the b*tch no mo! All with the 'E.J. baby' this and the 'E.J. honey' that. Man, she just usin' me for my pimped ride, yo. That and my fiercely incisive grasp of electoral politics. I finally said, yo, back off, and let a playa play!" He eventually lost interest in complaining about his 99 problems, and rolled out with a back-up singer for Parliament Funkadelic, who was there to play a few songs and present a white paper on ag reform in the Balkans.

Look, everyone in Washington knows you can't hope to step up to E.J. Dionne, Jr. when it comes to having pimp hand. He's got it, and he knows it. All you can hope is that he'll bring you along for the ride.

// posted by t.s. @ 6:33 PM