You don't know from bitchy

It's an expression I picked up at a dog show at Madison Square Garden when I was younger. "You don't know from (fill in the blank)."

Currently, it is, "You don't know from Bitchy." I'm ready to bite the hand that intermittently feeds me. Several times.

Unfortunately, Jim Jeffords left the Republican party, so now I have less to bitch about as the democratic Senate calendar takes shape. I was gearing up to flame on about faith-based initiatives and how they would hurt us non-Christian dogs with arthritis, and the disrespect for the environment, and the cold shoulder to California in its hour of energy need. But it looks like I'll have to look elsewhere to complain.

True, Bush is just leaving for Europe, so there ought to be some good fodder there as he discovers that although the dollar is king in the world of business and election finance, other countries use this strange brightly colored toy money. And, the death penalty is illegal all over Europe, gays serve openly in the military, and only a handful of people die from handguns each year. What a strange place this must be to George W.

I expect the cordiality will be overflowing as perplexed leaders wonder why the US is violating the ABM treaty, walking away from the Kyoto agreement, and why all those 70s and 80s cold-war advisors who didn't have a clue that the wall was coming down until it was being sold as souvenirs in Times Square, are making decisions.

I feel like I should be happy when things stay the way they were. And at my age it's hard to feel happy about anything, let alone the fact that today I wasn't maneuvered into a worse position than yesterday by someone who not only doesn't care about me, but doesn't even know I exist.

It's hard living with arthritis, and we shouldn't have to pop our knuckles till they swell just to be heard. P.J. O'Rourke, that pseudo philosopher and hack writer, held forth on the stupidity of wheelchair ramps. He explained that the cost didn't justify the use. Standing in front of a post office, his opinion was that people in wheelchairs could enter through the loading zone which already had ramps for the mail. He said this with a straight face as if money spent on people with special needs wasn't more than an electron-sized piece of the federal budget.

The P.J. O'Rourke's of the world are flourishing because we are told the way out of an energy crisis is to consume more energy, and the way to insure Social Security is to give everyone a tax refund, figuring we won't be around in 2016 when the Social Security Administration is predicted to go bust. And the way into the post office, if you're not a robust athletic speciman, is by way of the loading ramps in the back.

It reminds me of another time when a fellow canine was programming in Cobol at a major bank in New York. He, and virtually every other programmer, used two-digit fields for the year. This meant that 1971 was entered as "71". He, and all the other programmers, knew that in the year 2000 this would be a major problem since the software wouldn't know whether the date was for 1971 or 2071. But he figured that by that time, nobody would be using the software he wrote. He was wrong and the world spent hundreds of billions to fix what became known as the Y2K problem.

We're looking at problems that dwarf Y2K in the areas of public health, healthcare, social security, the environment, energy and education. And all I hear is the wind rushing over his head as his daughters get drunk and his advisors play hardball.

You don't know from bitchy.