This was White Flag Republican Ric Keller speaking on the floor of the House a couple of days ago:

Let me give you an analogy. Imagine that you have a next door neighbor who refuses to mow his lawn, and the weeds are up to his waist. You mow his lawn for him every single week. The neighbor never says thank you, he hates you, and sometimes he takes out a gun and shoots at you.

Under these circumstances, would you keep mowing his lawn forever? Would you send even more of your family members over to mow his lawn? Or, would you say to him, you better start mowing your own lawn or there’s going to be serious consequences for you?

I’ve become all too familiar with Congressman Keller’s type the last few months. They don’t really understand the situation in Iraq or the wider battle against Radical Islam. Because they consider themselves quite bright, they assume that no one else does either. To help everyone make sense of what’s going on, most often themselves, they try to boil down complex matters into simplistic metaphors.

Normally, my inclination in these instances is to help educate our congressmen. In the past I’ve posted helpful cheat sheets to aid our “book larnin’”-averse solons in distinguishing between Sunnis and Shiites. I’ve also posted reading lists for our Congressman, showing extra care to select titles that weren’t particularly long and that usually had relatively large print. Using these as guidelines, my conscience couldn’t allow me to recommend Michael Oren’s outstanding “Power, Faith and Fantasy.” Though brilliant and informative, Oren’s book is a 600-page treatment of America’s historical involvement in the Middle East. Not only is the print small, there are few pictures. It wouldn’t help anything to recommend a book to our congressmen that would likely frustrate even their most sincere efforts.

Even for a congressman, Keller is obviously a special case. In the virtual special-ed class that is our Congress, Keller sits in the virtual corner wearing the virtual dunce cap. If I sent him off to read Walid Phares or Mark Steyn, would it really do any good?

Clearly not. To help Keller understand our geopolitical problems, I must communicate with him via his preferred medium – the idiotic metaphor. So here goes.

Okay, Congressman, let’s say that we are mowing our neighbor’s lawn. Let’s say the neighbor’s entire family isn’t uniformly grateful and that the place still looks like a pig sty in spite of our best efforts. Still, there are a few more things you want to work into the equation.

For instance, you mentioned the neighbor has weeds, weeds up to his waist. Did you know that those are pernicious weeds? If those weeds are not adequately taken care of, they will take over not only the neighbor’s lawn but soon the whole neighborhood. Someday, those weeds are going to be threatening our very own lawn, even though we live a couple of streets away.

There will probably even be some times when those weeds make serious inroads on our verdant grounds. We had to deal with them before, back in Fall of 2001. Do you remember that? It ruined the entire autumn. We had to spend the whole season spreading Scott’s LawnGro to contain it but it still did incredible damage.

Also, did you know that the neighbor’s lawn has an incredible vegetable garden? That vegetable garden helps everyone in the neighborhood eat right, including us. No matter who controls that garden, people will still want to buy the vegetables it produces. There will be a lot of hungry and sad faces around the neighborhood if everyone doesn’t get their heirloom tomatoes and beautiful cucumbers.

In short, I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s in our own selfish interest to help our neighbor take care of his lawn. Once we teach him how to ride the Toro and use the Weedwacker, he’ll be able to do it himself. But we can’t just walk away from the situation because we don’t like his attitude. We have to help him for as long as it takes to get that lawn ship-shape and until we’re sure that he can keep it that way. Even if his punk teenage son uses the Toro we gave him as a “lawnmower bomb,” we can’t give up.

Yes, it would be nice if he were a little more grateful. It would be even nicer if he would give us some of those delicious vegetables as a gift for all we’ve done. But we don’t expect that. All we want to do is get him to the point where he can take care of his own lawn. Besides, there are some other houses on the block that have that same weed.

There you go – so simple even a White Flag Republican can understand it. I hope.

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