A NEIGHBOR TO THE WEST OF US confines his two burly Rottweilers in a smallish wire pen near Brush Creek. They bark incessantly, driving anyone within earshot witless, and so I have named them Al and George.

  Actually, this is a libel against dogs, for which I am heartily sorry. Thank God most of them don't have lawyers. Like children, in the absence of adult supervision, when a dog sees something it wants, it goes for it, without mercy, and without intermediaries.

  If only American presidential politics were as pure as a dogfight, or even a squabble between children over ownership of a booger. But politics is real life, what Shakespeare in Macbeth called "a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,/And then is heard no more; it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury/Signifying nothing."

  Blow, Winds, and Crack Your Cheeks! Sound and fury, signifying nothing, is the best one can expect when two overfed aristocrats find themselves simultaneously snatching at the last hors d'oeuvre on the proffered platter. Rarely having been denied anything in their privileged lives, they find the concept of finishing second best unbelievable, unfathomable, unacceptable.

  "Mine! Mine!" they squeal, with all the inspiring leadership of Russo's brothers battling over that booger. There is more presidential timber among the inbred boobs in Monty Python's "Upper-Class Twit of the Year" skit.

  And it's not as if nobody warned us. In an 1813 letter to John Adams, Thomas Jefferson noted: "There is ... an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendency."

  Ask Not What Your Daddy Can Do For You.... The Bushes like to think of themselves as the Live Kennedys, but their anointed Prince of Camelot more closely remembles a Duke of Hazzard. Watching Dubya struggle to portray himself as the president-elect, holding faux Cabinet meetings and Muppetesque press conferences that would have most 4-year-olds looking for wires and Frank Oz, is like watching a prepubescent Alfred E. Neuman playing CEO in his daddy's suit.

  Gore, meanwhile, continues his national Don Quixote Memorial Lecture Tour, tilting at Republican windmills. It's like watching a blind hog rooting for truffles in a Wal-Mart parking lot. They say the man is smart, but he orchestrated a campaign that couldn't have elected Pamela Anderson Lee Mistress of Discipline at a juvenile detention center. And now he thinks he can outlawyer the competition in the Bingo State, where Dubya's brother, state campaign manager and political affiliates hand out the cards and call the numbers.

  This would be akin to Pee Wee Herman trying to unseat Vito Corleone. And we all know what happened to Pee Wee last time he went to Florida.

  Florida: It's Like a Whole Other Country. Big Al should take a cue from Juan Ponce de Leon, who went to Florida in search of an impossible dream -- the Fountain of Youth -- and got croaked by the Calusa Indians for his pains. He died in Cuba, like many a Democratic candidate looking for votes in this sunburnt swamp full of alligators, Republicans and other ruthless carnivores.

  Better yet, Gore should take his guidance from Russo's Nobody's Fool, in which the hapless father contemplates advising his eldest son, from whom the booger has been snatched: "Will, for heaven's sake, you can't really want that. Let the little jerk have it."

  Let Bush have this worthless booger of an election. He'll have a bloody nose to go with it before the midterm elections in 2002.

  This column is exclusive to the DogSite, for reasons that should appear obvious. The map was stolen from the Encyclopedia Britannica. Any dimbulb Democrats bearing a misplaced faith in Florida jurisprudence should be aware that my late uncle, Taylor County Judge Charles Declan O'Grady of Perry, Florida, once shot himself in the leg with a pistol he kept for self-protection.

• A previous rant about the election and the Book of Revelation.
  
  
• A pointlessly obscene screed about the Floridicks.
  
  
• Back to Mad Dog Media.