Issa Issa Baby

You just never know where the next genius is going to come from, but it appears that we may have found him in this Darrell Issa, the (R) congressman from California whose net worth hovers around the $250 million mark.  He knows everything, and there are even some things he knows about and does not talk about.

Speaking of talking, remember that annoying voice saying "Step away from the car!" when you got within ten yards of an auto with a Viper brand car alarm?  That was the voice of Darrell Issa (say "ICE-uh,") who was the chief executive of  Directed Electronics Inc, manufacturers of that irritating appliance.  He took the fortune he made from that company and went into politics, and lookie here, all of a sudden he is in his sixth term and has been elected chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, meaning that he is one of the people who will hector President Obama on every little thing that the president does from now til Obama leaves office in 2016. After the elections of this past November, Issa sent a letter to 150 bigshot corporations and associations asking them which of the president's regulations Congress ought to go after, and Baltimore Congressman Elijah Cummings, who serves on that Oversight committee, pointed out that what Issa did is simply “inviting businesses to tell us what they want us to do as opposed to protecting the American people.”

Which is why we broke away from England all those years ago, to make things better for rich businessmen, right?

Vanilla Issa

Meanwhile, Issa voted against the Employment Nondiscrimination Act (ENDA), which prohibits employers from discriminating on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation.  Himself a proud descendant of Lebanese grandparents, Issa nonetheless votes against members of other minority groups in this time-honored fashion.

Darrell Issa, while in the Army on a bomb-inspection detail, claims to have provided security for President Richard Nixon at the 1971 Orioles-Pirates World Series, sweeping the ballparks for bombs.  Nixon didn't go to any of the World Series games that year, though; that was the only hitch in that story.  But hey, I once fixed a five-course dinner for Princess Grace, although she didn't show up to eat it.  And the letter that I got in the mail yesterday was the seventeenth letter in a row that I have not gotten from Britney Spears!  Maybe the eighteenth.

Issa and his brother, who later served three years in the Ironbar Hilton for car theft, were once arrested for car theft, but hey, haven't we all driven away in a red Maserati from a showroom? And when Issa was popped for driving a yellow Volkswagen the wrong way down a one-way street in 1972, and the cops found a Colt pistol, 44 rounds of ammo, and a tear-gas gun with two rounds for it in the glove box, well, he told them that he had the right to carry arms to protect his property.  44 bullets and a tear-gas gun should have been enough to protect himself if Canada had suddenly declared war on him and him alone.

But hey. Youthful indiscretions, right?  I mean, haven't we ALL been indicted on grand theft charges and been caught riding in stolen vehicles with our brother before he went up for a three-year bid?  I mean, this Issa is a genius.  Here's why - and you can read all this in the New Yorker, if you could just give FOX News a rest for a second:

Issa bought the car alarm and electronics company in February, 1982.  That very September, the place burned down!  Electrical in nature, the firefighters said, and Issa blames the blue flames that burned into the California night on the fire department's failure to shut off a gas line, so never mind that the St Paul Insurance Company's report a month later said that the fire was incendiary, with evidence of a flammable liquid being poured over a stack of cardboard boxes, and two sources of ignition.

And just after the fire, one of his associates in the business told the investigators that right before the fire, Issa had moved the computer out of the office, with all the discs and equipment for an early pc, and had moved important files and designs from filing cabinets into a fire safe and had "increased his insurance from a hundred thousand dollars to four hundred and sixty-two thousand dollars."

The man just knew it was time to move valuables out of the building right before the building burned down, and had a hunch that the time was right to buy more fire insurance.  This makes him the greatest prognosticator of our day.  Hats off to Darrell Issa, who now is free to hassle Obama.  Surely the ability to forget his past leaves him plenty of brainspace to see the future.