Pass the Cake, Sîl Vous Plaît

Marie Antoinette is offering that damned cake, again. You’d think she would’ve learned her lesson on that score. Last time she invited us over for tea and cake she sniveled about the media only showing us the “one bad bombing each day”, rather than showing all the good things that are happening in Iraq (as noted in the “Progress” posting earlier today).

This last week she set out another plate of petit fours and sniffed that “No one suffers more than their president and I do when we watch this” in Iraq. Really, Marie; are you serious; or are you just scratching that itch on your neck, again?

Madame First Lady, dare I suggest that there are millions of people in Iraq and in the U.S. and other Coalition countries who feel a hell of a lot worse about the events in Iraq than you and our president do? Take the following for instance:

§ The families and close friends of every dead U.S. and Coalition soldier. That alone puts us into five figures of people ahead of your suffering level.

§ The 25,000 wounded U.S. troops, some of whom have had to suffer through substandard treatment at Walter Reed Hospital and elsewhere, and the families and close friends who tend to their often devastating wounds. That puts us into six figures of people ahead of the First Couple in the feeling-really-bad line.

§ The families and close friends of the 70,000 to 100,000 Iraqis who have died since your family and close friends ordered the invasion of Iraq to look for WMDs and state-sponsored al Qaeda cells that didn’t exist. If that doesn’t put seven figures of sufferers ahead of you East Wing dwellers, then the next one will.

§ The two million Iraqis who have been displaced from their homes over the last four years of war and destruction. Many of those homes have been destroyed; many of them will be uninhabitable for years to come, if ever again. After all, not too many Sunni families are looking forward to returning to their largely Shia neighborhoods, and vice versa.

But, I’ll give you this, Marie – you’re an improvement on the last generation in the palace. Literally a couple of hours before your husband announced that the invasion of Iraq was underway in March 2003, the Queen Mother in the Bush monarchy, matriarch Barbara, told Diane Sawyer in a Houston interview:

"But why should we hear about body bags, and deaths, and how many, what day it's gonna happen, and how many this or what do you suppose? Or, I mean, it's, it's not relevant. So, why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?"

Now, that’s the epitome of not feeling anything at all. That mind is not so much beautiful as it is untroubled. If fact, it’s so untroubled that it’s deeply troubling to get a glimpse into it. A mind is a terrible thing to waste, especially in a monarchy.