From this weekend’s Capitol Gang:

O’Beirne: …Senator Kennedy’s angry rant this week was a disgrace! We have young soldiers engaged in bloody battles. Imagine how that sounded to those young Marines and soldiers in the field, that he’s giving a morale boost to their enemies.

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Well, that’s nothing new. If you criticize the President during wartime, you’re going to get accused of giving “aid and comfort” to the enemy (easily one of the least-understood and most-twisted phrases in the Constitution, of course, but let’s stay on-message here…). So let’s go with a stupid metaphor:

Imagine you’re at a party, when your friend Jon gets a paper-cut on his hand. It was probably those cheap, overly stiff cocktail napkins that are to blame, but that’s not so important right now. After a brief flurry of suggestions, your friend Josh takes charge of the situation and attempts to help Jon…

…by severing his arm at the elbow.

Okay, NOW you’ve got a problem, no doubt about it. Jon’s bleeding profusely. The party has turned bad, for sure (even the guy who’s been trying to convince the DJ to play the “Macarena” for its camp value can see that), and you’ve got a crisis on your hands. You might be tempted to yell at Josh, but this is not a time to bicker over who cut off who’s what - What everyone needs to do is join together and focus on the real problem (Jon, severed arm). Jon is undoubtedly your priority. Jon needs help…

… which Josh attempts to offer by chopping off Jon’s OTHER arm in a bid to “balance him out.”

All righty, now this is a bit of pickle. Most of the reasonable people in the room were thinking of putting Jon in an ambulance and maybe putting the detached arm on ice or something. But Josh has gone ahead and made things worse, at least in your opinion. But once again, let’s not get distracted from our essential mission of helping Jon. He needs our support. The last thing he needs to hear is someone screaming, “Oh my god, what are you doing, Josh? Now he’s gonna frickin’ die!” That’s not the message you want to send to Jon, who is now losing blood rapidly. No, let’s be constructive here…

That’s when Josh reasons that Jon has lost too much blood to be wasting it on frivolities like legs. Grabbing a saw, he heads towards good ol’ Jon again…

I’m not being subtle here, but then again, it’s an unsubtle and essential argument that needs to be made: At some point, somebody’s going to have to say, “Who the hell put Josh in charge? And for the love of God, can we please keep him away from Jon?” And yeah, if Josh resists being taken out of a leadership position, you may just have to risk bringing the room (and Jon) down by exclaiming “You’re killing Jon, you idiot! Please stop it!” Emotionally, Jon may not want to hear that the continued severing of his limbs poses a serious health risk, but he’s probably realized this himself at this point. And the time has gotta come when you stop letting Josh make stupid, shortsighted decisions that are consistently making things worse.

Of course, the Bush Anti-terror Adventure might not be quite as ridiculous as Josh’s medical approach. The shortchanging of the Afghan war and reconstruction, the rush to war in Iraq with shaky evidence, the demonstrable intelligence failures, the alienation of traditional allies, the failure to win hearts and minds, the overtly American majority on Iraqi soil, the excessive fiscal and military burden, the street-to-street fighting that plays into the enemy’s hands by creating more outrages and civilian casualties… all these have rationales or explanations that are at least slightly more logical than Josh’s.

So the degree is debatable. But the principle holds: At some point, somebody’s gotta say, “Hey, cut it out, dude. You’re hurting Jon.” Sadly, you may have to risk bringing Jon’s morale down if you have any interest in saving his life. So you’d might as well go ahead and say it. As a longtime and avid party-goer, I know this for a fact: Once someone loses a limb, most social events kinda lose their momentum anyway.