While We're At It, Let's Sink The Doughnut

SCOTT C. brings us another episode of The Little Boy Who Overcame Everything But Chronic Flatulence, Based On A True Story. Yesterday finds Jonah G. using the same pastry-based metaphor, on the very same day, as his preferred presidential candidate.  Ladies and Gentlemen: The Growing Pie.

"[Senator Obama is] more interested in controlling who gets your piece of pie than in growing the pie."

--McCain

Millions of Americans...don't see the economy as a pie, whereby your slice can only get bigger if someone else's gets smaller.

--Goldberg

My Poor Wife was at the dining room table, doing grades, when the McCain clip came on the "news" last night, and I mistook her reaction for evidence she'd gotten one of those Dove chocolates from the candy dish lodged in her windpipe. (Her entire family laughs like that, by the way; thank God she's the only one of 'em with a sense of humor).  She finally calmed down enough--I was in the same room by this time, having dashed in prepared to Heimlich her--to sputter, "Did he really just say what I think he just said? 'Grow a pie'? And she's an art teacher.

Jonah, of course, should be the first pundit in America to realize that pie only gets smaller.

Okay, to be clear about it, maybe they say this all the time. It's certainly redolent of the thieves' cant of the American boardroom, or the jargon of middle management catamites; maybe it's heiress-argot, trickled down. And I have no idea who said it first, the Doughy Pantload or Senator Queeg. Was it Bill Clinton who kept running around talking about "growing" the economy? At least he had growing up dirt-poor as an excuse.

Once I realized my darling was in no danger of choking I was reminded that these are the people who not only presume to tell you American education is failing, but who claim to hold the tools needed to fix it.

My second thought was, well, I remember the odd hour after high school had ended for the day spent combing the ugly green-and-puke-colored shag carpeting in my room for lost nuggets of hashish, so I can at least sympathize that these guys are out of bumper-sticker slogans, regardless of how much I've longed for the day.

But upon reflection, and with no intention of bothering to solve the central mystery of its origins, I think what's really at work here is the behind-the-scenes pie-knife fight for control of what will be left of the Republican party come November 5. It's the Dements versus the Aments.