The American garden of mediocrity is in full bloom, showing off its most precious weed - rose-colored glasses, while the scent of the foreign policy skunk weighs heavy in the Washington air. If upon the arrival of spring a man’s thoughts turn to baseball and love, that special time for politicians is the summer where they can do the most damage since Joe Taxpayer’s on vacation.
Ah, the romance of Washington always gets me choked up, or is it the smell of the foreign policy skunk hampering my free breathing? He’s a busy little guy and arguably more popular than Socks the cat or Millie the dog were in their heyday. He’s sprayed all over the news these days and got every politicians’ underwear in an uproar over at least eight time zones – and that’s on a slow day.
But who or what is this foreign policy skunk, running around and musking up tempers from Russia to the Beltway? We knew he was in the garden when he started spraying the Palestinians back in June, and everyone in the Middle East complained because they were downwind and received the full brunt of his “I’m here!” announcement. He didn’t become a problem for Washington until mid July after spraying the Lebanese and we found ourselves upwind in a toxic cloud without tomatoes. There’s an old joke about “lighting a match” around bad smells, but that didn’t work. Much to our chagrin, our neighbors to the east started to politely ask us to control our skunk. “He’ll run out of spray, just let him get it out of his system – we really think it’s indigestion and you’re misinterpreting the scent.” We didn’t believe it any more than you did over there, but it was something neighborly to say with a false level of comfort.
After approximately five weeks of waiting for the foreign policy skunk to run out of spray, some punk kids in their neighborhood decided to take matters into their own hands. Armed only with Katyusha slingshots, they leaned over the wall, took aim, and nailed him dead in the sprayer, hoping to make him stop. The skunk went ballistic and began taking revenge on everyone over multiple time zones for the indignity suffered to his sprayhood.
Everyone is up in arms, begging and pleading for us to control our foreign policy skunk, and now we’re told by leadership if we get the kids who shot skunky and send them to juvenile detention hall, our odorous friend will calm down. Otherwise, removing skunky’s ability to spray would leave him defenseless and create a scent free vacuum. I’m sure all our friends in the Middle East would enjoy not having to purchase tomatoes by the truckload – the money could be better spent on reforms in their own countries, or is that too logical of a possible assessment?
It’s time we put some fur to our foreign policy skunk and stop trying to pass him off as a cat with a white stripe. No one’s buying this lie no matter how many press conferences Secretary Rice and President Bush hold trying to convince us otherwise.
First off, the foreign policy skunk isn’t a newcomer to the garden – he’s been spraying our neighbors in the Middle East for quite some time. Although he’s been a regular wandering through their streets spraying at will, we are under a certain level of self-delusion, believing our friends’ delicate scent receptors in their noses have long ago been burned out of their skulls, thus allowing us to tell them the gentle bouquet in the air is not our overly aromatic friend at it again. It’s time to pick a pair of rose-colored glasses from the garden.
Forgive me for my cynicism when it comes to statements regarding a ceasefire and pull out creating a “Middle East power vacuum”. I don’t believe the great sucking sound I’m hearing has anything do to the Middle East - it’s too deafening and has enough force to clean the lint out my wallet long after record high gas prices took care of the “dead presidents” that used to smile back at me. I think it’s coming from Washington. If I tune into the Weather Channel, I’m sure they’ll confirm the anomaly in the jet stream pattern sooner or later.
Second, we’re always after the punk kids in the neighborhood – any neighborhood. I don’t think we care if it’s our fight or not, we just like “in” so we don’t feel left out. Somehow we think if we can catch the fat kid wearing the purple striped shirt and the white fez propeller beanie, we can rehabilitate him. He doesn’t need rehabilitation – he simply wants to eat tomatoes in a salad instead of having to bathe in them after our foreign policy skunk wanders through and paints him like a laser target. He keeps asking us for the same thing over and over again, but we don’t listen. “Take your skunk home!” If the Arab world let their foreign policy skunk roam around and spray our kids, we would make a trip to the sporting goods store and buy a BB gun or a paintball gun and take it out in a blaze of glory. We'd be singing, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition!” Why are we getting upset when they start resorting to the same tactics we would take? It’s because of our foreign policy skunk rules: 1. “do as I say and not as I do”, and 2. “do as we say and no one will get sprayed”.
