Should Bryce Harper Be in the All-Star Game, or Run for President? You know something has gone officially haywire when a 19-year-old baseball phenom becomes a touch point in national politics, by doing nothing more extraordinary than being a 19-year-old phenom. The phenom in question is the Nationals" Bryce Harper and he became an Internet sensation by responding to an absurd question from a journalist last week by saying, "That's a clown question, bro." It was in response to being asked if he was going to celebrate his birthday with a beer, and Harper is a Mormon. His answer took on a life of its own thanks to YouTube, sprung up on T-shirts, found traction in pop culture and in video remixes like this one: But now, Harper has even cracked the political arena. At a news conference Tuesday, Senator Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, responded to a question with Harper's line, although he sort of ruined the effect by prefacing it with, "I don't want to answer that question." This is not even in the same ZIP code of absurd as a blog post on The Daily Caller by Mark Judge that starts with the sentence, "Bryce Harper is a conservative hero." This wasn't even entirely spawned by his beer-question response, but because a lazy play in the outfield by the Braves" Jason Heyward on a Harper hit prompted Judge to conflate Heyward with teachers" unions. If you'd like to read a spirited send-up of Judge's essay, Charles P. Pierce goes at him with both barrels on Esquire.com. And it didn't exactly take someone with a partisan ax to grind to find the hilarity in Judge's piece. As Craig Calcaterra writes on the baseball blog Hardballtalk.com, "I don't know if this is worse baseball analysis or political analysis, but it's all kinds of bad either way." Perhaps this is what people had in mind when they brought a major league team back to Washington, but we suspect not.