Why not round up a gaggle of Enron and Haliburton executives and take them to your oak-paneled woodshed?  Call in Michael Jackson and demand to know about his plastic surgeries. Also the “Jesus Juice” and the funny business in the bedroom?

Why not call in your colleagues and ask them if they’ve ever cheated on their spouses? (Could you call Derek Jeter in, just for the heck of it, and ask him what Mariah Carey’s — nudge, nudge, wink, wink — really like? I’m just curious.)

Heck, you guys apparently have all the time in the world and nothing to do with it. Why else would you be carving valuable chunks of time out of your busy days to question some overgrown kids who get paid to sweat in public about something that happened as much as ten or 15 years ago?

Could it be that congresspersons are as savvy about getting face time on the tube as athletes? Could it be that you’re sick and tired of C-Span not being able to outdraw the Jigsaw Puzzle Network and are determined to boost the ratings?

Or are you all ticked off because you didn’t get free tickets in the sky boxes at Nationals’ games, and this is your way of getting even?

I appreciated when congress went after Selig and Fehr. Somebody had to slap them around and get them to understand they had a problem. And you did what all the columnists in the country couldn’t do — test for steroids and penalize people who cheat.

Mission accomplished.

Slide show   Boys of spring See images from major-league teams' training camps.

But now, I look around and I notice that there are one or two trifling issues that I — ignorant as I am about the business of government — would think might be even more important than asking Jason Giambi how many times he and Jose jabbed each other in the butt and seeing how many times I can make him invoke the Fifth Amendment.

I understand that there are some issues with social security, and, after many years of contributing to the system, I’d really like to be able to collect on it some day. And just the other day I heard Warren Buffet saying that we’re becoming a nation of sharecroppers, working to pay off the folks overseas who increasingly own the country. It has something to do with deficits, which I notice keep getting bigger. Is that something I should be concerned about?

Gasoline, they tell me, might hit $80 a barrel this summer, and try as I might, I can’t see anyone in Washington doing anything that could be generously construed as constructive about breaking our dependency on Mid-East oil.

I hear that taking on issues like the debt and the hideously low minimum wage and energy and social security reform are going to take courage. That explains why you’d rather engage in a dog-and-pony show with celebrity athletes over an issue that’s in the process of being addressed.

At times like these, you can’t improve on Mark Twain’s observation: “Now, suppose you were an idiot, and suppose you were a congressman. But I repeat myself.”

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