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Suitable? Hardly. Nice Set of ThreadsBy Rick Horowitz Just so you know: It's been a terrible week for the flight suit. And nobody's more surprised than the flight suit himself. That's right -- "himself." Saying "itself" wouldn't come near to capturing the utter maleness of the thing, would it? Muscles bulging in all the right places. Testosterone oozing from every seam. Is there a piece of he-gear anywhere that can measure up to the flight suit? And this isn't just any flight suit, you know. This particular flight suit was only worn by the most powerful man on the planet, on the most powerful day of his powerful power. This was George W. Bush's flight suit, the one he wore the day he landed on that aircraft carrier and told us how well everything had gone in Iraq. May 1 of 2003, to be precise about it -- exactly three years ago this week. The flight suit was expecting parties. Maybe a little exhibition at the Smithsonian. A victory lap over at the Ellipse. Something. But the closet door hasn't budged. And the flight suit is not in a good mood. "Like it was my fault things didn't work out?" he mutters to himself. "I held up my end of the bargain!" It's hard to argue with him. People all but swooned when the prez swooped down in that Navy jet and popped out onto the carrier deck. A vision in green with a helmet in his hand, he strode past those cheering troops like a man who'd actually been to battle -- and maybe he even started believing he had been. That would explain all the strutting and the preening. A flight suit can do that to a certain kind of man. Maybe the commander in chief momentarily forgot that the carrier only looked as if it were out in the middle of some Perilous Nowhere. It was all a matter of clever camera angles, of course; he could have made it back to San Diego in a dinghy. But why spoil the illusion? And speaking of illusions, the flight suit wants to know, who was the genius who came up with "Mission Accomplished"? Wasn't that just asking for trouble? Do you really want the guy standing in front of a banner like that when the fighting is still going on? When you haven't quite nailed everything down yet? Even a flight suit can see the risk in a stunt like that: What if something goes off the track? What if plenty of somethings go off the track? Not that anybody asked his opinion -- not at the time, and certainly not since. The flight suit was such a hunk, people just assumed he couldn't think his way out of a rip-stop nylon bag. When it came to strategizing, the White House had "experts," and "consultants." They knew exactly what they were doing, or so they claimed. What kind of war plans they needed. What kinds of pictures they wanted. So much for experts. So much for consultants. Which one of them came even close to predicting the length and the cost of the entire operation, let alone the body count? And the flight suit's supposed to take the fall for their mistakes? For their arrogance? No way! Not in any kind of fair world, anyhow. Meanwhile, the closet door still hasn't budged. Nobody's stopped by to retrieve him, to air him out and shake out his wrinkles. Hours pass, then days, and the realization starts to dawn: Nobody's going to stop by to retrieve him. And the worst of it is, it's not over. Which means more billions, more bodies, more anniversaries to come. He almost said "to celebrate" -- more anniversaries to celebrate. But nobody's celebrating. Posted 5/2/06. Who
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Rick Horowitz
