Out to the cornfield

Jonathan Chait had a column in the Dec 10 LA Times called The bubble boy in the Oval Office in which he explores the dynamics of everyone in the administration's treathing the current president like a little boy. But not just any little boy...

THERE IS a famous "Twilight Zone" episode about a little boy in a small town who has fantastical powers. Through the misuse of his powers, the little boy has ruined the lives of everybody in the town — for instance, teleporting them into a cornfield, or summoning a snowstorm that destroys their crops. Because anyone who thinks an unhappy thought will be banished, the adults around him can do nothing but cheerfully praise his decisions while they try to nudge him in a less destructive direction.

This episode kept popping into my head when I was reading about President Bush and the Baker-Hamilton commission. Bush is the president of the United States, which therefore gives him enormous power, but he is treated by everybody around him as if he were a child. ...

Yes, Mr. President, it's good that you turned Iraq into a Hobbesian inferno of Al Qaeda terrorists and Islamist death squads. It's really, really good!

So, we were discussing this column at work, and one of the guys came up with this:

"Yer a BAD MAN, General Shinseki! A BAD MAN!!"
"Help me, everyone! If we all rush him at once, he can't get us all!"
"Yer a VERY BAD MAN!"
"No! Don't!"
"I CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE OF IT! DO YOU ALL WANT TO LIVE LIKE THIS FOREVER?"
"Yer a bad man an' I'm gonna make you into somethin' bad."
"Aaaaaaaaauuuuuuuuuuuughghghghghgh!!!!!! He's prematurely retired!! Send it away, George, quick, send it to the cornfield! Send it away like you did Richard Clarke, Robert Reich, David Kuo and all the others..."