Tie WHAT to a fence?

Most families have their own little inside jokes. Perhaps it's something silly someone said once (my father, unable to understand what my mother was shouting at him from two rooms away, entered the Pantheon of the Immortals when, making the best of incomplete information, he bellowed "Tie WHAT to a fence?").

But such things are inherently idiosyncratic -- based on peculiar and insular shared experiences. They're radical versions of the joke that's not funny because you weren't there. It is, in fact, impossible for any outsider to wholly understand. And that's why such things are cherished by the small circle who share them.

I get the feeling that the same is true of the Angry Democrats and their fellow travelers in the Vampire Press (as Mrs. Lincoln called it). They, like any other close-knit family, share experiences. Of course real families share real history, while The Angry Democrats and their friends share a complex of largely emotional biases and opinions, almost completely fictional. It's rather more like being victims of a group delusion or a shared hallucination.

Thus, for example, in his year-end column, David Broder could write:

How do you match the trio of Republican misjudgments summoned up by the names Katrina, Harriet Miers and Terri Schiavo?

He expects that we will all know what he's talking about. We'll get the reference.

But to pick only the last, my recollection involves a comatose woman whose husband caused her to die by withholding food and water. She died of thirst before she could starve to death. That would be murder. But I'm pretty confident the hallucinating Mr. Broder meant something else. And I'm certain that the Angry Democrats know exactly what he means, and had a good laugh.

Similarly, today's Washington Post includes this editorial cartoon by the lightly talented Tom Toles. [The Capitol building sporting a dialogue balloon that says "Of the rich, by the rich and for the rich saves us three syllables."]

Does Mr. Toles -- and the WaPo Editorial Board -- really think that Americans don't pay enough in taxes? It is a fact that for 2003 (the most recent year for which complete information has been released), those in the highest earning 25 percent of taxpayers paid 84% of the tax dollars collected by the federal income tax, despite earning only 65% of the income. And, by the way, that top quartile of earners includes everyone with adjusted gross income over $57,343 -- truly the super rich. Go look it up. See for yourself what the Treasury projects for 2005.

Or do they mean to suggest that the United States, so long as Mr. Bush is President and the Republicans control Congress, is in the thrall of the rich? I suppose that would be Teddy Kennedy, Jay Rockefeller, and George Soros. Or do they mean Richard Causey, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers and Joe Nacchio? I think I’m missing the joke again.

Just what is the joke we're all supposed to get?

But part of the WaPo's shared hallucination -- part of the family joke -- is that poor people pay taxes, and rich people pay none. While rich people (despite there being so few of them) somehow engineer the election of Republicans despite the willofthepeople. So, I suppose, we're all intended to get a good chuckle out of the joke that the Congress (and we know that means the racist, sexist, homophobic, easily-led fundamentalist Republicans, not our Angry Democrat brethren) thinks it would be Lincolnesque to record these truths as self evident. Droll. Very droll.

Reading the newspaper is really hard work when you never get the joke.

Now: Where's my Faithful Sherpa?