Yeoman! Sidecar!

Going back to ages past, my best friend and I would praise any particularly brave, foolhardy and generally ballsy act by anyone in our circle, or the world in general, by repeating the order we always imagined Captain Kirk shouting just before undertaking an act of similar chutzpah:

"Yeoman!" Kirk would shout, snapping his fingers with relish, "Sidecar!"

Because that's what he was gonna need to carry his cojones into battle.

The Reverend Jesse Jackson sits in the captain's chair today. Because, for good or ill (and trust me... ill) he's sporting a pair of big brass ones this morning.

Thanks to Paul at Wizbang, I found an excellent piece by Michael Barone at Townhall.com published on February 21.

And I also found the same column attributed to Jesse in today's February 22 Chicago Sun-Times.

Now, from either side of the political aisle, the ideas in the column are sound. That likely accounts for what made this brazen theft so attractive to the Reverend.

But how could he have been so foolish as to think that he wouldn't be caught out? In today's environment, with journalists, anchormen, editors and pundits falling from grace faster than an acre of Amazon rain forest, what has possessed Jesse to make him believe that he could get away with it?

What, other than brash stupidity and an arrogant certainty that he stands above such petty criticisms, could be the cause?

Update: Apparently the cause is stupidity and laziness. It appears now that the Sun-Times ran the column under the wrong byline. I found a print edition of the Bright One and sure enough, Michael Barone's name and face head the column. If I had the technology to scan or photograph the page and share it, I would.

Now that it's clear that a good proofreader would solve this problem, it's not nearly as fun to think about.

Pity.