Rhinocrisy

Yesterday, the brilliant James Wolcott penned a missive about the bizarro-world “compassion” of the Bush Administration. But it might have been quicker simply to draw readers’ attention to this story, which I believe captures the Bush Administration’s level of empathy for the misconvicted, for the tsunami tsurvivors, for the various victims of bombings in Iraq, Indonesia, Israel, you name it, and for so many more I’ve lost count.

Convergence of Driver, Bicyclist Ends in Arrest: Bystanders Track Alleged Assailant
By Petula Dvorak
It began as a shouting match on a busy Capitol Hill street corner during the frenetic morning commute, a bike-vs.-car incident not uncommon in a big city.

But then the silver-haired, retired Navy lieutenant got out of his car, approached the red-headed ballet dancer riding a bike and allegedly shoved her to the ground, authorities said. He got back into his car and, as bystanders followed him, drove down the block to his nearby office, the bicyclist said.

The man was identified as Ted E. Schelenski, 64, vice president for finance and operations at the Heritage Foundation, a think tank that promotes conservative policies. He pleaded not guilty this week to a charge of simple assault.

(There is much more at the Washington Post site.)

The difference is that the VP-Finance of the Heritage Foundation was promptly hauled off to jail, which is what decent people do to sociopaths in everyday life. For some reason, people are able to pretend that international affairs are different from city sidewalks.

After London, many smart liberals are ranting about how this disproves the “flypaper theory.” You know, the idea expressed by the President of the USA when he approvingly quoted, “We either deal with terrorism and this extremism abroad, or we deal with it when it comes to us.”

Sorry folks, but the flypaper theory is a success. While the liberals complain about its supposed failings, that just shows what they know about flypaper.

Flypaper is a sticky amber-colored film often seen hanging in a barn. It smells sweet to the manure flies; they fly at it for a treat and get stuck.

There are different ways to reduce the flies on a farm. At some groovy hippy farms, they let the cattle wander around in the fields, dropping cow pies here and there. Cow pies would normally provide a fertile ground for fly reproduction, so farmers bring in a mobile chicken coop. The birds scratch through the cow pies, breaking them up into fertilizer and scavenging the fly larvae — better known as grubs — as nutritious snacks.

This can, according to farmers I’ve talked to as I root through their meadows, pretty much eliminate flies. When chickens chew up grubs, they are, as the MBAs say, incented to them all. If you don’t let the manure pile up, the chickens, which in this analogy is the decentralized force of a healthy social system, can keep farms free of flies.

Then there’s flypaper. Anyone knows who has actually lived on a farm (sorry President Bush, but your “ranch” doesn’t count) knows that no matter how much flypaper you hang up in a barn, there are always flies rising from the manure pile, and some escape. That’s because flypaper catches flies after they’re born.

Farms that use flypaper to fight off the pests rising from ever deeper and more fetid manure (I’m thinking of my childhood home here) are doomed to flies not just in the barn but in the pond, on the porch, and once in a while, in the house.

The flypaper theory is exactly right. Iraq is a manure pile. Our brave soldiers, sent as decoys, are flypaper. And London, on the morning of 7/7, demonstrated how well flypaper works.