Thanks to loyal Platformista jjk for passing on his copy of Christopher Buckley’s latest Washington satire, “Supreme Courtship,” which posits that a bowling-loving president with epically low approval rates would nominate a sassy TV judge to the Supreme Court.

I’m a big Buckley fan and happily spent Saturday reading this latest novel, delaying the repainting of my front porch. Darn.  But since Joe Biden is coming to town this week for the vice presidential debate, and since Sen. Dexter Mitchell, D-Conn., the “villain” in “Supreme Courtship,” bears some resemblance to the senior senator from Delaware in his days as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committe, I thought the following excerpt would be of interest:

He was good-looking, in a shiny sort of way. He’d had his front teeth capped. They were now so blindingly white that when he bared them, you could almost hear a little tingg! and see a star of light reflect of the incisor, just like in the commercials. He cheerfully admitted to having Botox injections, and even had a nice line about it: “I need all the help I can get get. My job involves a lot of frowning.” He had an attractive wife named Terry, attractive children and an attractive beagle named Amtrak. (Senator Mitchell sat on the Transportation Subcommittee and fought fiercely for subsidies for America’s railroads, especially the one that ferried him from Stamford to Washington and back.

If a computer were programmed to design a president of the United States, it might very well generate Dexter Mitchell. Everything about him seemed, indeed, calculated. And yet for all his qualifications, Dexter somehow added up to less than the sum of his considerable parts. His epic loquacity was not an asset. Successive campaign advisers had tried without success to get him to give briefer answers, but nothing had stemmed the logorrheic tide, the tsunami of subordinate clauses and parenthetical asides, the inexorable mudslide of anecdotage. His campaign “listening tours” were occasions of mirth among political reporters, since it was the people he met who did the listening. Dexter Mitchell would happily express himself on any issue, at any time.”

Change a few names (Connecticut for Delaware, teeth-whitening and Botox for hair plugs) but the inspiration is clear.  And you should see what Buckley does to Justice Antonin Scalia with the fictional Justice Silvio Santamaria