... and sent them to Baghdad. And he's just been spotted grabbing 21,500 more.
Last week there were two big stories. A St. Louis man was caught kidnapping a second boy to go with the one he'd been holding for four years, and the President announced he was sending more troops to Iraq. And we could ignore the obvious similarities, or we could come right out and say it: Alleged kidnapper Michael Devlin something something George Bush.
Okay, that's a cheap shot. And even worse than that, it's so obvious any idiot (Maureen Dowd) could make it. (No, maybe not Maureen Dowd; It doesn't involve a provocative correlation between Hillary Clinton and whatever's on TV. Hey... what if... Hillary Clinton... needed to be saved... just like the cheerleader on Heroes!!?)
Where's my Pulitzer?
But it is kinda weird, isn't it? That the same week this twisted tub o' lard in Missouri gets caught abducting a new kid for his menagerie, Bush says he needs more teenage corpses to stuff in the national crawlspace?
The President and the Pizza Dispatcher. One is a psychopathic moron whose motives are known only to himself, and the other is Michael Devlin.
Other eerie connections between Bush and Devlin? They both drove pickup trucks. Distrusted illegals. (Devlin called the cops on the Hispanic family across the hall.) Had a strong sense of territoriality. (Devlin, over his parking space. Bush, the Persian Gulf.)
One difference? Devlin worked long hours.
But the saddest similarity was that Bush and Devlin were both caught repeating the same immoral acts for which they'll already burn. Bush has 140,000 guys, but he wants 21,500 more. Devlin had one boy, but he wanted two. It's worse than a perverse and sinister urge. It's a rut.
Why are some loners so afraid to try something new?
What makes people do the same bad things over and over? Kidnapping children. Sending young men to die. Buying $30 DVD players at Target and expecting them to work.
Or wait, is that last one just me?
One of my favorite opening scenes in the movies is the one at the beginning of The Son of Kong. Carl Denham - the man who brought Kong to New York -- is hiding out in a run-down boarding house. Everyone in New York wants to sue him, arrest him, or lynch him, because his ape, you know, ate their relatives and wrecked their city. Denham is broke and alone and universally despised. So what does he do? He gets on a tramp steamer and goes and gets another monkey.
It's so wonderfully, awfully, human. And it's funny, because it didn't really happen. Unlike alleged perverts allegedly grabbing children, and the last six years.
At this point in the news cycle, people have lost interest in the kidnapper, and started to ask questions about the victims. Devlin held the first boy, Shawn Hornbeck, for four years. Hornbeck seems to have had friends, a girlfriend, even his own web page on Yahoo. Now people are wondering why he never tried to escape. But maybe it's one of those mysteries we'll never completely understand. Like why I sat all the way through Dreamgirls.
Or maybe it makes perfect sense. A forensic psychiatrist named Keith Ablow explains it like this: "If somebody has the power of life and death over you, that's a very good guy to feel aligned with, and so the mind does this: It tells people, look, I'm on his team because he has the power of life and death over me... What you see is, you see an absence of the reactions that we might anticipate. There's no great rage. There's no terrible sadness coming forth... That means the mind has compartmentalized his plight, which is what the mind does."
Okay, that might explain Hornbeck and Devlin. What about Bush and us?
--
Hey, 24 fans! Did you know that Kiefer Sutherland is 40 this year? That makes him the same age his dad was when he made 1900! In 1900, Donald Sutherland plays "Attila," one of Mussolini's Blackshirts; a fascist monster who beats defenseless people to death for kicks. And here's the odd thing: He's not the hero!
So, if you can't wait for the next 24, because you love watching Kiefer torture people in defense of the state, check out his dad!
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Suggested Subjects for Irate Posts:
Abduction, not suitable subject for humor,
Ape, not a synonym for monkey,
Dowd, Maureen, Chris Kelly not good enough to carry jock of,
Dreamgirls, Chris Kelly wrong about,
Heroes, guilty pleasure in,
24, better than Chris Kelly could write,