Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when he was the GOP Speaker candidate before withdrawing several hours later.

This one got me

We were somewhere around the capitol on the edge of a government shutdown when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should be speaker ..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of giant rats.

In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains.... Speakership candidates went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees.