A furious collective heehaw is surely the only proper response to the news that ranking bureaucrats and other occasional speechmakers at the Department of Agriculture have been instructed to include “talking points” of praise for President Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in their routine rhetorical fodder.
Detailed instructions on how to segue from, say, domestic soybean production to Mesopotamian nation-building were e-mailed to scores of department workers. Included was a caution that speechmakers should keep a record of their compliance, and turn in point-scoring summaries to be tallied for weekly reports to the White House.
Somehow, I doubt Iraqis quite get the humour in it.