Did you hear the new one about Kwame Brown?

No?

Who cares. Just don't let the door hit you on your way out.

This was originally, or at least as of June 28th, going to be another piece about your Nats.

It was going to be a happy little piece about the warm-fuzzies everybody around town gets when they talk about "our Nats," "our boys," "our team," about how was it even possible what those wacky kids from Montreal were doing to the National League East and the rest of baseball, turning the whole kit-and-kaboodle right over on its head, beating people night in and night out, scraping together wins while somehow scoring fewer runs than every other team out there. To put the whole thing in perspective, my high-school baseball team scored more runs than the Nats on a regular basis, and we set about every record there is for fewest wins.

Ever.

On any level.

By teams both alive AND dead.

But I digress. This was to be about warm-fuzzies. But then a remarkable thing happened. The same people who brought you Congressional Hearings on steroids in baseball decided to stick their noses into the upcoming sale of the Washington Nationals.

Somebody brought it to the attention of Rep. Tom Davis III (R-Va.) and Rep. John E. Sweeney (R-N.Y.) that an individual in one of the potential ownership groups bidding on the Nats was none other than left-wing liberal bogeyman George Soros.

For those of you not "in the know," George Soros is to Republicans what water was to the Wicked Witch of the West: an overly powerful cleanser. Just kidding! Soros is a very real pain to Republicans, and not just because he has crazy notions about how to combat drug-use and who should be running the country (legalization of marijuana and clean needle programs on the former, anyone not named George W. Bush on the latter.)

The real nuisance is that Soros is a billionaire and so has the cheese to get his messages heard.

The last thing Davis and Sweeney want is a guy like Soros hanging out in the owners box at RFK, looking down on them (literally! Gasp!), handing out subversive anti-Bush propaganda, and lighting up doobies during the seventh inning stretch.

Davis and Sweeney simply can't stand it. The very notion is repugnant, particularly to a guy like Davis who flexed a fair amount of political muscle to get the then-Expos relocated to Northern Virginia and then had to watch as the bow-tie wearing Mayor of Washington, DC, Anthony Williams, somehow get the team relocated to HIS sandbox!

Davis will cover up this whole mess by pointing out what a "polarizing" figure George Soros is. That's really the problem, Davis will say.

How's that, I ask? How is it he's more polarizing than Marge Schott? She was a racist, remember. She also had a special place in her heart for Nazi memorabilia.

How about George Steinbrenner? Remember him? He's a convicted felon, same as Soros. Steinbrenner was pardoned, they'll say. Soros was convicted in France, I'll counter.

What about Fred Malek, Davis's apparent personal favorite candidate for Nats' ownership? He's a massive fundraiser for the Republicans. He used to own the Rangers with George W. Bush. He also helped Richard Nixon ferret out a "Jewish cabal" that was making him look a fool from over in the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The point here is simple. Tom Davis, John Sweeney, and any of their other friends who see liberal conspiracies lurking around every corner need to take a deep breath, take a step back, and remember a couple of things: they are elected officials, first of all, elected to do a job, which, as far as I'm concerned, has nothing to do with baseball; and second, they should check in all their friends' closets before pulling skeletons out of the closets of their enemies.

Who buys what baseball team is up to Major League Baseball, nobody else. And any elected official that tells you otherwise is not only wrong, they're taking dangerous advantage of their elected office.

You may always reach Alex Cudaback at cuda2@yahoo.com