Jeff Vrabel: How did Congress get a 9 percent approval rating?!

Jeff Vrabel
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Last week a Washington Post poll revealed that the United States Congress currently enjoys a nationwide approval rating of 9 percent. That is 9 percent, as in one integer, as in Very Close To Zero, as in if you asked "Do you approve of the job Congress is doing?" to a group of zinfandel-sipping monkeys with typewriters in a warehouse in Des Moines, they would all say "Heavens to Betsy no Dear God no not at all are you NUTS?," because monkeys are actually pretty smart.

Needless to say this 9 percent statistic is shocking, mostly because I would have guessed somewhere between 9 to 40 percentage points lower. NINE percent approval? Are you sure you didn't mean nine people? Where do you thumbs-up smiley-faced keep-up-the-good-work types LIVE I wonder? Do you live in Congress? Are you all Boehners? Do you know what the Gallup people meant by "Congress?" Do you think they meant "Con-Air?" Do you think you were approving of Nicolas Cage? Because if so that's still a dismayingly high number.

According to the Post, there are other people who have had 9 percent approval ratings, and one of them was HUGO CHAVEZ in 2007. Not that anyone remembers who Paris Hilton is, but she had a 15 percent rating in 2005. And this very year 9 percent is two points lower than the phrase "U.S. going Communist." U.S. GOING COMMUNIST! And not like the buggley-eyed elderly Looney Tunes people who make signs like "OBAMA'S A CORMUNIST" but ACTUALLY U.S. GOING COMMUNIST. Walk into the nearest Cracker Barrel and select 100 random diners — two more of them will be Communists than fans of Congress. (Actually that's probably a bad sample, since Cracker Barrel has long been known as a Communist gathering place; they send coded messages via those peg games and those STUPID DAMN TWISTED NAIL GAMES YOU CAN'T UNRAVEL NO MATTER HOW HARD YOU TRY OR HIT THEM WITH A WRENCH.)

More scene-setting sadness: After it attempted to burn down the Gulf of Mexico BP still enjoyed an approval rating of 15 percent; Watergate-era Nixon was basically luxuriating in fragrant bubble bath at a comfortable 24 percent. "Breaking Dawn" has an approval rating of 28 percent on Rotten Tomatoes right now, and that's a mall-pop teenage daydream about why you should probably kill yourself if you don't have a boyfriend.

With these kinds of figures in hand, there is only one course of action: Round up this mysterious "9 percent" of people and deposit them on an island run by I don't know gorillas because there's zero reason anyone should be approving of anything. Take for instance the bill released last week that would pretty much fire a bright green disintegration-ray at the flimsy standards of "health" required of modern school lunches.

The bill, officially known as H.R. I Got Your National Obesity Epidemic Right Here, would block the USDA from limiting potatoes (pronounced "french fries" by anyone actually eating the potatoes in question) as well as delay limits on sodium and requirements to increase the amount of whole grains offered. It would also, as you've likely heard by now, count tomato sauce as a Healthy Vegetable, thus categorizing pizza as a vegetable and providing a pretty distinct focal point for the point where future historians to go "And here's where the weight gain truly began to spike." (Note: The historians would be morbidly obese.)

Now, one thing that people know about Congress, even these indefensible 9 percenters probably, is that Congress is not very smart, which is why it said "If 435 people can't decide on a debt reduction plan let's see if six of the same people can do it wait they can't that's weird." So there's no way they came up with this morbidly beporkening plan by itself, and why they let what the AP calls "food companies that produce frozen pizzas, the salt industry and potato growers" do it for them.

Note that I say this all as someone, and I can back this up with witnesses, who literally survived his junior and senior years of high school eating Little Debbie brownies and Snapple, because the degree to which those objects were preferable to Pizza Boats was hard to overstate. So there can be only one solution: I will immediately began removing my school-age son from the lunch line and taking him to Cracker Barrel, every day, until he's 18. If I'm lucky he can figure out the twisted-nail thing for me.

Jeff Vrabel loves that this column indicates Cracker Barrel is a more healthy choice than something else. He can be reached at and followed at

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