VP’s Modest Proposal

I was visited by the shade of Jonathan Swift the other day, and he asked me to blog the following interview. The interview is with an anonymous White House source, identified only by the initials “VP”. It deals with a new proposal circulating in the highest echelons of the Administration. The source has asked for his name to be withheld because he is too modest to seek credit for the idea.

JS: Tell me about your proposal.

VP: It is really quite simple. We solve two problems at once, that of the Al Qaeda prisoners and that of feeding the people dispossessed by the recent hurricanes. We simply butcher the prisoners, and feed the meat to the hurricane victims.

JS: But….

VP: I know what you are going to say. You are going to ask, isn’t that too expensive? First, nothing is too expensive in the defense of liberty! And in fact, Halliburton officials tell me that they can deliver the meat at only $100 a pound. We can easily afford that by cutting back on food stamps, school feeding programs, welfare and a few other programs we don’t like anyway.

JS: Doesn’t that run against the Geneva Convention.

VP: No you don’t understand. The Geneva Convention is just concerned with the treatment of prisoners of war. It doesn’t cover meat packing plants at all. We would no longer be troubled by Red Cross inspectors and others of their ilk. The inspections woud be done by the Department of Agriculture, and we can control them!

JS: But…

VP: I know what you are going to say. Wouldn’t that run against our objective of getting more information out of the prisoners. Not at all! Torture wasn’t working all that well anyway. But threatening prisoners with slaughter, rendering their flesh, and eventual cannibalism would really get their attention!

JS: What about the military response:

VP: Rummy tells me that he has just the boy to set up the program. If we train the soldiers right, they will do their duty. And if there is any unfortunate publicity, the way there was with Abu Ghraib, we can blame the problems on a few low ranking reservists. That always works!

JS: Wouldn’t the people displaced by Katrina and Rita object to eating human flesh?

VP: We'll have Karen Hughes to explain to them their patriotic duty. They are real patriots down there! One of the ideas we have been kicking around is to give the meat a good name. For example, we talk about pork, not pig meat, and beef, not cow meat. We could call it Americana! That would be patriotic!

JS: Isn’t it very unhealthy to eat human flesh? Aren’t you likely to find all the diseases that humans experience in the meat from these people from war zones?

VP: Another advantage! We have too many hurricane refugees (woops, survivors). If a few thousand get sick and die, well George isn’t too happy spending all that money on poor folk down there anyway.

JS: There are hundreds of thousands of people displaced by the hurricanes, and only a few hundred prisoners.

VP: Of course, we would have to collect a lot more suspected Al Qaeda terrorists. But we are finding more every day! There are not only the prisoners in Guantanamo, but those in Abu Ghraib and the other prisons in Iraq. Then there are the suspects from Afghanistan, The CIA can provide more. We could capture a lot more suspects if we needed to. In fact, I think we can produce so much Americana that we can export the stuff.

JS: Do you have any last words for our readers?

VP: The only thing I am worried about is if those Democrats start playing politics with this idea they way they did with the way we explained the wars, and the planning for the wars, and the support for the troops. They even made us fire Brownie because of the fuss the liberal media made about a few thousand people in the Super Dome. But I am sure that any real patriot will get behind this idea.