Rep. Shimkus (R-IL) busts out one of the most tortured analogies I’ve seen in a long career:
Imagine my beloved St. Louis Cardinals are playing the much despised Chicago Cubs. The Cardinals are up by five finishing the top of the ninth. Is this a cause for celebration? Is this a cause for victory? No. Unbelievable as it may seem, the Cubbies score five runs in the bottom of the ninth to throw the games into extra innings. There the score remains until 1:00 AM five innings later. However at the top of the 15th, the Cardinals fail to field a batter. The entire team has left the stadium. … Who wins? We know it’s the team that stays on the field.
So the Iraq War is like an extra innings baseball game, let’s see. That makes Al Qaeda the Cubs, so several high-priced, mediocre free agents are going to sign with them this offseason but they’re still going to finish in the second division, which makes me optimistic already. Hmmm, what else does it imply? I guess the country Iraq is like a stadium, and that means that the Green Zone is a luxury box and Fallujah is that part of the Chicago White Sox field where drunk psychos beat up third base coaches. Actually, this analogy starts to make sense if we pretend Shimkus was talking about the Phillies. Jury’s still out on whether Iraq’s safer than Veterans Field.
Bonus analogies: The Sunnis are like peanuts and the Kurds are cracker jack, the Iraqi Parliament is like those troughs at Wrigley Field where you have to piss, the surge is like a sacrifice fly and a car bomb is a suicide squeeze.
