Everyone's hoping Comet Massa will finish its near orbit and head back out to space to 75 years

Former congressman Eric Massa has gone- in a week- from ridicule to farce to pity. And, as this New Yorker clips points out, one of the challenges of being a legislator- state or federal- is that you get to make the rules for the sandbox you play in, and are surrounded, daily, by people willing to pay you to listen to them:

Actually, we learned a couple of things in the course of the evening, like that Larry King is better than Beck at keeping the patient under control. (Not that Larry King’s interview didn’t have its odd moments—tickling did come up, as Massa groped to find another word for “groped”—one that “wasn’t sexual.”) And we learned something that does affect us all: that while Congress may not be for the level-headed, it is especially destabilizing for those who are already a bit off. “Listen, I don’t know whether this fellow needs media help or mental help. It’s probably both,” David Gergen said on CNN:

I think he’s addled by all of this. In some ways, you know, he’s become a political corpse. The best thing we can do is draw—put a sheet over him and move on.

Not quite yet. One has to ask how much of an outlier Massa really is in Congress. In one of his more lucid moments, he told Beck:

I don’t have the life’s energy to get up at 5 o’clock in the morning, and work until midnight, spend five hours on the phone begging money. I have completely abandoned my family for five years.

Who does have the energy for that? Who—worse, perhaps—is energized by it? Massa’s case does raise an interesting question: How hard is it to find five hundred and thirty-five sane men and women to fill the halls of Congress? You’d need an awfully big sheet to cover the entire Capitol.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2010/03/massas-tickle-fight-problem--and-ours.html#ixzz0hskuZz6k