Yet again, Senator Robert Byrd shocked his colleagues when he criticized President Bush for using "an aircraft carrier . . . as an advertising backdrop for a presidential political slogan," and made other remarks suggesting that Bush's address on the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, as well as his arrival by jet wearing a U.S. Air Force flight suit, was improper. Byrd said that Bush was a "desk-bound president" improperly assuming the "garb of a warrior" to make a campaign commercial.

Upon hearing Byrd's remarks, Congressional democrats wet themselves and fled in a panic from the Capitol, trampling several pages in the process. Unconfirmed reports indicate that Sen. Joseph Lieberman, who is running for President, coughed up a matzoh ball onto the lap of Teddy Kennedy, who found it there several hours later and put it with his golf clubs. Richard Gephardt was said to have become quite pale, but the allegation was impossible to confirm.

Byrd had already frightened his colleagues last year when he voted against the war in Iraq, saying that giving the President the authority to go to war in order to help the President resolve the conflict peacefully "was absurd.' Senate Democrats called him "insane," "dangerous," and "wacky."

The only Democratic member of Congress to stay in the Capitol with Byrd was Congressman Henry Waxman, who caused many of his colleagues to throw themselves off of the top of the Congressional Record (Vol. 5, 2003; height of nearly one foot) by asking the GAO to investigate and provide Congress with the cost of President Bush's trip to an aircraft carrier that was so close to the San Diego shoreline, he could have rowed himself out to it.