The needle on my schadenfreude gauge just moved into the red zone, where my soul may be in peril.  After all, it is indecent to take pleasure in the suffering of another being, and I have no excuse.  But really, am I supposed to pretend this misspelling by Senator Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) on a giant poster on the hallowed Senate floor doesn't deserve mockery?

In the interest of fairness, here is the entire context on video.  It is even better because she doesn't notice the misspelling as her aide switches the cardboard posters on the easel, and she drones on, clueless to the mildly moronic spectacle she offers.

It is just too rich to ignore.  Dumbing it down with posters and dumbing yourself down at the same time.  All the more delicious because the rhyme "Cantwell can't spell" springs to the mind so readily.

It's rich because everyone knows that the Democrats are the party of intellectual pretension.  They are in bed with the politicized higher education industry, receiving the lion's share of political donations from the ivory tower and pretending that their views are more informed and "scientific" than those of their opponents, upon whom they look down with disdain.

I honestly do not know who was the first member of Congress to bring an easel to the floor of the House or Senate and use a series of poster-sized pieces of cardboard with slogans printed on them, kind of like pre-computer PowerPoint slides, only even more stilted and awkward.  Surely, the practice did not exist before C-SPAN's cameras began televising sessions of Congress, as the small audience of tourists, journalists, and the occasional member of the chamber who actually bothered to show up would not be worth the trouble of printing up the oversized visual aids.  And proofreading them.

The most notorious, widely ridiculed congressional user of posters up to now has been Rep. Alan Grayson:

I understand the utility of visual aids and have used plenty of them in the course of making presentations of various sorts, beginning with the age of transparencies and overhead projectors through today's state-of-the-art capabilities of video display.  Big pieces of cardboard on an easel is the worst, most awkward method of directing the audience's eye.  As far as I am concerned, that is a feature, not a bug, when it comes to Congress.  Forcing members to use cardboard charts produces pictures of them standing next to their handiwork.  And pictures are more powerful than mere words in mental impact in a number of ways.  So I encourage Congress to stay with tradition and not allow computer displays on the floor of either chamber.

Hat tip: Jim Hoft, Gateway Pundit