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An item about ridiculous questions supposedly asked of travel agents by clueless Congresspersons is yet another instance of an old bit of generic humor's being modified to apply to contemporary politicians. We've collected examples of this list of howlers dating from as back as far as 1998, and those earlier versions failed to identify the geographically challenged as members of Congress, instead presenting them as 'a client,' 'a secretary,' 'a man,' 'another man,' and so forth. Those earlier versions also began with a preface that trumpeted the collection as Actual stories from a variety of Travel Agents rather than the politically repositioned Actual stories provided by a retiring Washington, D.C. travel agent of 30+ years: In July 2009, a more specific version began circulating that coupled the names of actual Congress members (all of them Democrats) with the various entries, identifying them as the political goats of the moment. Some of the entries were obviously anachronistic -- for example, a 2003 version referenced a New Hampshire Congresswoman, but Carol Shea-Porter, the first woman ever elected to Congress from New Hampshire, didn't take office until 2007: Because such lists are ever-changing, some of the earlier entries fail to appear in the modern dumb Congresspeople versions, namely: At any given moment, you'll find this list circulating with a number of confusing arrangements in which some entries are present but others have been omitted. Similar lists such as the Funny comments made on Welfare applications and Howlers culled from insurance claims forms also tend to pick up and shed entries as they pass from one set of hands to another. Lists such as these sometimes make their way into the newspapers, where they slip by editors and are run under 'funny but true' headers. Though we won't dispute they're funny, the 'true' part has yet to be substantiated by anyone — some of the entries may reflect situations encountered by anonymous travel agents somewhere, sometime, but they may also be nothing more than deliberate concoctions by unknown humorists rather than verifiable proof that folks (especially Congresspeople and Senators apparently) are getting dumber all the time. As to why such tales appeal, as one columnist said in 1998: Like anything on the Web, they should be taken with a grain of salt. But they certainly ring true, and that grain of salt might well irritate wounds that many of us have suffered stumbling over ourselves during periods of trip-witlessness. Besides, it's kind of comforting to be able to believe we're all that much smarter than our elected officials. (We'd never waste our time looking for Hippopotamus, NY, on a map, we say to ourselves smugly.) It's that little bit of barely suppressed self-satisfaction that makes such lists a hit with so many.
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