14 October 2007

Sanchez Confused - Poor George Takes the Blame

Because I'm Bernard's friend, I once again found myself at a restaurant with his sister Mattie. She was raving about the restroom.
“This is a really fancy restaurant,” she said. “They have emotion sensors and even have a little farting corner with fans that disperse the odor.”
"Fans for farts?” Bernard asked.
“Yes. They’re just on the wall, and the fans point downwards to take away the gas. Very clever.”
“Mattie,” Bernard sighed. “Those are for drying your hands.”
“Oh no. I don’t think so,” Mattie smiled. “They have paper towels for hands.”
“What’s an emotion sensor,” I stupidly asked.
“They sense when you want water for your hands or want to flush the toilet.”
“Emotion sensors that sense desire. Very useful. I think they have those on Wall Street. They’re designed to detect fear and greed,” I said. Bernard gave me a look of grief and shook his head.
“What?” Mattie asked.
“Nothing. He’s just talking,” Bernard said.
“He’s such a strange man,” she whispered to Bernard, her voice as loud as when she spoke. “He says such confusing things.” She folded her hands into her lap and then said, “Have you seen the news reports.”
“About what?”
“All about General Sanchez.”
I was impressed. Mattie grudgingly watches Fox News in spite of the fact that it’s a “little liberal for my taste,” as she once told us. That she would know about Sanchez, the former head of the military in Iraq impressed me. Sanchez has now said that Bush’s troop surge is a desperate attempt to make up for years of mistaken strategy in Iraq. That Mattie would know about this and even bring it up gave me hope. Perhaps the conservatives were learning from their mistakes and could change.
“I did hear something about that,” Bernard said cautiously.
“Yes. Apparently because of him, President Bush now has to invade Iran.”
“What?” Bernard exclaimed.
“He was head of the invasion of Iraq but apparently he got everything mixed up. President Bush wanted to go into Iran but Sanchez went into Iraq.”
“Sanchez got the countries mixed up and attacked Iraq when Bush wanted to attack Iran?” Bernard repeated.
“Well,” Mattie said in another of her loud, conspiratorial whispers, “he’s one of those Latino-Americans. English is probably his second language. Of course he got the orders confused. Now we have to do this all over again.”
Bernard and I sat in stunned silence. Finally, I found words, “That’s going to be a hard one to do all over again.”
“You do know,” Bernard said, “that Iran’s population is more than twice that of Iraq. As if Iraq wasn’t hard enough.”
“It’ll go better then,” Mattie said. “The more people, the better a democracy does because they have more voters.”
“More voters?” I asked.
“Yes. It’s just like big countries have better economies because they have more shoppers.”
“So, you think that’s a good idea? Attacking Iran?”
“It’s not just me. Bill Kristol thinks so too.” She paused. “And that man has such a lovely smile. It’s not like he would just attack people who didn’t deserve it.”
“Of course not,” Bernard sighed. "Where is our waitress?"
"She's probably using that fancy bathroom," Mattie said. "I just love technology."

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Moby (yep, that Moby) riffs on this issue from a different angle:
http://www.moby.com/journal/2007-10-13/united_states_living_nightmare_iraq_no_e.html

7 comments:

Moby Dick said...

Sadly, Mattie's theory is probably not far off what the Bush Family will use when the time comes to invade Iran and suspend presidential elections as a result of imposing martial law on the USA to save us from impending terrorism which all Republicans agree is about to happen.

cce said...

I had a very similar dining experience with a Mattie-like creature on Saturday night. Since we are neighbors, I politely held my tongue when he announced that NPR is the reason that sex offenders roam our streets and the real estate market if taking a dive. He espouses the 'whatever ails us must be the fault of the liberal media' brand of conservatism. Good news though. Because I behaved myself and didn't even utter a poison word in response, he bought us dinner. Boy can I feign solidarity.

Ron Davison said...

iron-man,
welcome to R World. I certainly hope you're wrong.

cce,
I have plenty of opportunities for such dining experiences within my own family. Sigh. The good news is that the meal was free. The bad news is that you had to wash it down with pepto-bismo.

Anonymous said...

Hey! I thought we had a nice time!

And, come to think of it, I believe you picked up the tab.

David said...

Very clever Ron but you want to be very careful with believing pissed off general officers who command "torture chambers" and don't get their fourth stars and suck their thumbs a lot. Sanchez is acutally just a poor sport. Gotta run, misplaced my Medal of Honor and have a VFW meeting tonight.

Ron Davison said...

Scott,
always happy to pick up the check - but I could have sworn that Bernard paid.

David,
yep, Sanchez is an idiot. I forget - is it that the commander in chief never makes mistakes or the generals who never make mistakes or just the commanders in chief and generals who disagree with the guys at the local VFW hall?

David said...

Ron-O
I didn't say Sanchez was an idiot. I said beware of the sour grapes syndrome. Our CinC has made plenty of mistakes and so did Sanchez but he's covering his six o'clock and blurring his personal issues with criticisms no matter how well founded. If you count the generals pro and con the pros win but does that make it correct? Nope. One must look at the details and very few either have access or are qualified to assess on that basis. You don't find answers in VFW halls either. There are some reasonable and no-grudge hypotheses to be found in military history readings.