By Katherine Rizzo, CQ Staff

From Political Perceptions, WSJ.com

Covering Congress can be a lot of laughs.

To win attention for their ideas, zealots go to great and entertaining lengths.

Who wouldn’t get a kick out of watching someone bowl with frozen poultry? And though I’ve never bothered to show up to see fashion models in lettuce-leaf garments, enough cameras do to make it an annual event. And then there’s the cheap thrill of asking gotcha questions of drive-by celebrities who go blank when a query goes beyond their prep materials.

It’s fun – and a way to balance a brain overly crammed with budget rules and bailout details.

Lately, though, being a professional Congress-watcher has been more sad than fun.

Larger-than-life characters have been exposed as just plain human. They get old, they get feeble, they get sick, they get to the end of the gravy train and they get kicked when they’re down.

Not that long ago, it would have been hard to imagine that Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska would be either kicked or down.

Mr. Stevens has been in the Senate longer than any other Republican. And he hasn’t just been showing up for work every day since December of 1968. He went about his job with the aggressiveness of a military pilot, which he was with great success during World War II. If Alaska needed it, Mr. Stevens was going to get it and he didn’t mind who he had to bulldoze in the process. Appropriations? Mr. Stevens was only too glad to be part of the process of doling out dough, but all involved knew that whatever amount other states were getting, he would try to get more for Alaska. Question the need for federal dollars going to some Alaska project and stand back: the force of nature wearing an “Incredible Hulk” necktie would open his mouth and a burst of fire would shoot out.

Now look at him.

On his 85th birthday, Alaska counted enough absentee ballots to make it clear that Mr. Stevens lost his election. Even if he had won, Mr. Stevens had nothing but grief ahead of him – colleagues who feared him and respected him but may not have exactly liked him now were threatening to take away his coveted Appropriations seat to show they don’t tolerate corruption. And he’s trying to stay out of prison, appealing a federal court conviction for failing to report that he had taken a bunch of freebies from a crony -- big stuff, like a Viking grill, major home improvements and a gigantic fish sculpture whose beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

A man who zips so fast through the marble hallways that 20-something journalists have a hard time keeping up was moving a bit slower this week and looking not like a roaring Hulk but a thin, stressed-out old man.

Another titan, Sen. Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia, is being wheeled around the Capitol, still third in line to the presidency (after the vice president and speaker of the House, the president pro tempore of the Senate comes next) but as of January, no longer the Appropriations Committee chairman.