One of the polls that appeared on today’s Rasmussen Reports website found that five percent of American voters still think Congress is doing a good or excellent job. Five percent! How is this possible?

Who are these 5 percenters? What could possibly be animating their thinking? This is an important question. I mean, there are more than 300 million people in this country. Five percent of that number equals more than 15 million people.

Could there really be 15 million of my fellow countrymen and women who for some reason still think highly of this Congress? Is there something in our water to explain this? In gasoline additives? Is there some way we can recognize these people on the street so we can cross over in time and diminish the chances of attracting their attention? Of getting them excited?

Perhaps this astonishing level of continued support for Congress is short-lived, however. If these turkeys don’t somehow manage to keep us all from going over the fiscal cliff in the next few hours, that five percent number might finally come down to an appropriate level — a group composed entirely of members of Congress themselves and their immediate families.

Then we can all just settled in, relax — and look forward to re-electing almost all of them again in another two years.

Such is the state of our American democracy. Cry the beloved country!

(You might enjoy checking out my two comic novels — Fifteen Feet Beneath Manhattan and The Bellman’s Revenge.