We knew we should’ve renewed our membership at the Safari Club. They had a celebrity auctioneer Tuesday night, you see, by the name of Tom DeLay. One of the items he auctioned off was “a sheared beaver fur vest,” and before you start sniggering at that, well, the former Majority Leader was way ahead of you.

Heard on the Hill quotes DeLay-as-auctioneer: “Who wants a beaver?” “Everybody likes beaver, even women” and (“as a couple of people in the crowd recall”), “The best thing about it, it’s a shaved beaver!”

At one point, as the bidding went up, DeLay pointed in the crowd to Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) as he held up the fur vest and said, “Sen. Burr, they don’t have beaver like this down in North Carolina.”

Burr, according to his spokeswoman, got to the event late and “was not aware” that DeLay had impugned the beaver of North Carolina.

The beaver went for $1400. To a lobbyist, natch. DeLay’s daughter Danni DeLay Ferro, acting as spokeswoman, points out that, had the item been different, her father “could have made a joke about a shaved zebra, but that’s not what the item was … it was what it was.” As Gertrude Stein said, a shaved beaver is a shaved beaver is a shaved beaver.

Leave it to Beaver [Roll Call]

Drudge got us all excited there for a second:

And then we scrolled down the page:

Matt, you’re such a tease!

Drudge Report
Special forces to use strap-on ‘stealth wings’ [Daily Mail]

The hard copy of today’s Washington Post contains this photograph and caption:

The road trip by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw has personified the “special relationship” of the United States and Britain.

Ah, the power of scare quotes! It’s amazing what such innocuous-looking punctuation marks can do.

In the online version, the Posties have toned down the caption innuendo. But the article, by Glenn Kessler, is still full of disturbingly suggestive references:

A sly smile began to form on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s face as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw explained Monday why they had the authority to put pressure on Iraqi politicians to form a government. The massive investment of money and manpower by the United States and Britain, he said, gave them “a right to say, ‘We’ve got to be able to deal with Mr. A, Mr. B or Mr. C. We can’t deal with Mr. Nobody.’ “

Rice broke in, “Jack, I’m sure we’d be all right with Miss A or Miss B or Miss C, too, right?” As reporters burst out laughing, Straw put a hand against his face and recovered, “Yeah, we would… . “

Flirtatious banter between foreign ministers? Clearly we have a romantic comedy on our hands. We nominate Halle Berry and Hugh Grant for the leads.

Additional excerpts and commentary appear after the jump.

On Thursday, they were in Berlin, jawboning the Russians and Chinese on Iran’s nuclear program. Rice took a brief detour to Paris and then ended up that same day in Liverpool, England. On Friday and Saturday, Straw squired her around the former Beatles haunt and the town of Blackburn, which he represents in Parliament.

Squiring — isn’t that what playboys do with hot young models?

Aides say they genuinely like each other and — unlike many high-powered figures — don’t seem to get on each other’s nerves. Straw is the only foreign minister Rice will regularly pick up the phone and call, rather than having the State Department operations center arrange the conversation.

Direct, one-on-one telephone contact? Cleary a veiled suggestion of phone sex.

When they flew overnight to Baghdad, Rice gave Straw the bed in her cabin and slept on the floor in the aisle, prompting the Guardian newspaper to quip that Straw had been “embedded.” Straw said he thought Rice had another bed on the plane and was mortified the next morning when he discovered she had slept on the floor.

“Embedded”? Hehe, gotta love those Brits.

Glenn: If you’re trying to tell us something, why not just come out and say it?

(On the other hand, one can’t read too much into the fact that Condi let Jack have the bed. That woman is so hard core, she sleeps on the floor for fun.)

On the Road With Condi and Jack [WP]