I say: Incompatible ingredients, hastily thrown together on a hard crust, a poorly planned, scrambled mess attesting to the utter incompetence of the chef, smeared with some horseradish and mustard on the side. Overpriced, too.
To be sure, Republican apologists would spin it as a "freedom sandwich," lauding its chaotic disorganization as ultimately promoting self-reliance and boldly guaranteeing that Iraqi oil money will eventually pay for it. Indigestion, yes, but it's the kind of sandwich that starving peoples would die for. Liberals just don't have the stomach for freedom.
Jesting aside, I might remind readers that the reasons for Paul Wolfowitz to resign go well beyond his recent Shaha-brouhaha. Some of us called for his resignation fully six months ago. Throughout his career, everything he has touched has turned into a world-class calamity. I defy anyone to name one unmitigated policy success for which he can claim principal credit. The man is a walking train-wreck.
Wolfowitz reportedly resorts to coarse language in some of his professional affairs. I try to avoid it, blogging and elsewhere. But I recall one salty saying from my blue-collar working days that applies here, as another lunch metaphor for Wolfowitz's fierce fecklessness. My fellow lumberyard workers would quip disdainfully about an incompetent person: "He'd fuck up a free lunch." That's Wolfowitz in a nutshell. You'd think that after presiding over the Iraq War disaster he'd try to rehabilitate himself with a gracious tenure at the World Bank. But he can't help himself. He screws up time and again.
Wolfowitz is just another in a long series of blundering, blustering, bullying, bone-headed Bush Bumblers. Each one of them deserves ridicule as a bad deli sandwich (or worse). Alberto Gonzales? I say: Texas baloney on a fat bun.
Illustration by Marty Higgins