Samurai Politician?

So what do I do when I don't know what to write? Sometimes I try tripe like I did August 8, which floated like a lead balloon. Sometimes I get lazy and copy and paste an old blog and call it new. I figure, especially if the original is more than a year old, readers have probably forgotten it anyway. That doesn't sound condescending at all, does it?

There are times where I do a 'Today in History' thing. It's fun, it can be enlightening even in a trivial way, and in this internet age is extremely easy to do. And it's precisely what I set out to do this morning. Only I got sidetracked.

On this day in 1833 was born in Japan one Kido Takayoshi. Now I want to stress that I have nothing at all against Mr. Takayoshi. Indeed I never heard of him before this morning. He appears to have been a very important figure in the Meiji Restoration, where Japan was reunited (it had for years been dominated by feudal warlords who had the country sliced up into their own little kingdoms) under the Emperor. He was a samurai who helped his country turn more towards the West.

All that's well and good. But I laughed out loud when I read his all too brief one line biography on the August 11 Wikipedia page. It read plainly: Kido Takayoshi, samurai and politician.

Perhaps this merely reflects on my own sophomoric sense of humor but the two concepts seem totally foreign to one another. All I can think of is John Belushi's Samurai Baker, Samurai Accountant, Samurai Optometrist (and the like) schticks. Samurai Politician?

Of course, maybe we could use more of those. It sure would help C-SPAN's ratings.