Okay, no, though I really have wanted a reason, any limp excuse, to write that headline and, come on, it's not as if many of them don't deserve to be open-back gowned and lined up and snappity-snipped, even again in many cases for, as we know,

Love is Wonderful

                                       The

                                                 Second Time

                                                                             Around.

Well, forty-four people's representatives have given me the headline and what so many legislators the world over have so long deserved, and, quite seriously, the real sac their nation deserves and needs.

     Their nation is Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) where one sturdy legislative soul even allowed news snaps of his Abrahamic/Ishmaelite snappitty-snipping. 

     But it's not all for fun.

     Long and very short of it is to model a useful way to combat HIV on a continent where the procedure has been shown to reduce the possibility of infection through heterosexual sex by sixty-percent. 

     The first legislator to make the Good Sacrifice [name just too good to be untrue],

                               Blessing Chebundo,

said he was scared at first but post- split-second surgery he felt

very.

             much.

                            at.

                                     ease.

Mr. Chebundo said he felt up for a quick soccer match but then the lidocaine wore off. He may take the field in a day or five. 

     I would not want my sixth-grade humor to obscure the serious issue here, the truth that Zimbabwe has suffered terribly from AIDS and while its president, Robert Mugabe, hardly enjoys a reputation as either a humanitarian or as a forward-leaning political thinker  -- much like his Rhodesian predecessor, apartheid champion Ian Smith -- Mr. Mugabe asked members of his and other parties to join in the circle-circ -- okay...allow me some high toned license...(and to get HIV tests -- over a hundred did) in order to blunt what remains a stigma, that is, the test itself. Fourteen percent of Zimbabwe's adults are infected with AIDS and while that is a drop of thirteen percent over the past fifteen years, much remains to be done.

     Mr. Mugabe at best is a thuggish churl, but even churlish thugs can do the right thing once or twice in a lifetime. We should applaud the legislators who have done this.

     And here? Perhaps someone might persuade my least favorite Little Legislator, former House Whip (well, he was), Virginia's tiny-whiny Eric Cantor, for once to stand tall and help fund something, anything, that actually helps people.