Captain Nerd Visits Bridge of USS House of Representatives

Here's Rep. David Wu (D-Dorkville) bringing up the Vulcan-Klingon sectarian divide we've long feared.

Come learn the truth about the White House Vulcans, after the jump.

It's funny to laugh at geeks, of course, but Wu's televised remarks are more than disturbing evidence that our elected leaders apparently believe television space monsters are real -- they're also a grim reminder of the death of classical education even for the so-called elites in this dumb country.

The foreign-policy "Vulcans" of the first Bush Administration were not, in fact, named for a fictional pointy-eared race of logical space monsters who breed every seven years. And only Condi Rice and Stephen Hadley remain of the original group, who took their name from the Roman god Vulcan -- a massive statue of which stands in Rice's hometown of Birmingham. 

(As the god of fire and metal-working, Vulcan's statue was erected in the Alabama city because steel was its big industry. Not all that long ago in this country, classical mythology was embraced by the leaders of cities and states. Now it's all "The Ten Commandments" and 1,000-foot-tall Jesus Crosses and Meth Labs.)

Many of the alleged Bush Vulcans were never actually part of the little club, which was made up of mid-level Bush 41 advisors. Cheney and Rumsfeld gleefully destroyed the careers of most of the original seven dwarfs, while Rumsfeld took special joy in totally ignoring Rice for six years.

Somehow, this basically meaningless nickname came to mean Bush's entire foreign-policy team -- including Cheney -- had been named for a God of War, even though they would then be called The Martians and people like David Wu would be really confused.

As for teevee's Vulcans, they were supposedly a warblogger race in their past, but thanks to yoga and dope they were able to become weird pointy-eared Jews like Leonard Nimoy. The Romulans -- named after the, uhm, Roman founder/twin Romulus -- were a war race, as were the Klingons. In the original teevee scripts, the Klingons were supposed to be Asian guerrilla warriors based on the Viet Cong.

But as a general descriptive name for this administration's actions, the god Vulcan isn't totally inappropriate, as He is also the God of Destruction.