The American garden of mediocrity is in full bloom, showing off its most precious weed – rose-colored glasses, while the scent of the foreign policy skunk weighs heavy in the Washington air. If upon the arrival of spring a man’s thoughts turn to baseball and love, that special time for politicians is the summer where they can do the most damage since Joe Taxpayer’s on vacation.

Ah, the romance of Washington always gets me choked up, or is it the smell of the foreign policy skunk hampering my free breathing? He’s a busy little guy and arguably more popular than Socks the cat or Millie the dog were in their heyday. He’s sprayed all over the news these days and got every politicians’ underwear in an uproar over at least eight time zones – and that’s on a slow day.

But who or what is this foreign policy skunk, running around and musking up tempers from Russia to the Beltway? We knew he was in the garden when he started spraying the Palestinians back in June, and everyone in the Middle East complained because they were downwind and received the full brunt of his “I’m here!” announcement. He didn’t become a problem for Washington until mid July after spraying the Lebanese and we found ourselves upwind in a toxic cloud without tomatoes. There’s an old joke about “lighting a match” around bad smells, but that didn’t work. Much to our chagrin, our neighbors to the east started to politely ask us to control our skunk. “He’ll run out of spray, just let him get it out of his system – we really think it’s indigestion and you’re misinterpreting the scent.” We didn’t believe it any more than you did over there, but it was something neighborly to say with a false level of comfort.

After approximately five weeks of waiting for the foreign policy skunk to run out of spray, some punk kids in their neighborhood decided to take matters into their own hands. Armed only with Katyusha slingshots, they leaned over the wall, took aim, and nailed him dead in the sprayer, hoping to make him stop. The skunk went ballistic and began taking revenge on everyone over multiple time zones for the indignity suffered to his sprayhood.

Everyone is up in arms, begging and pleading for us to control our foreign policy skunk, and now we’re told by leadership if we get the kids who shot skunky and send them to juvenile detention hall, our odorous friend will calm down. Otherwise, removing skunky’s ability to spray would leave him defenseless and create a scent free vacuum. I’m sure all our friends in the Middle East would enjoy not having to purchase tomatoes by the truckload – the money could be better spent on reforms in their own countries, or is that too logical of a possible assessment?

It’s time we put some fur to our foreign policy skunk and stop trying to pass him off as a cat with a white stripe. No one’s buying this lie no matter how many press conferences Secretary Rice and President Bush hold trying to convince us otherwise.

First off, the foreign policy skunk isn’t a newcomer to the garden – he’s been spraying our neighbors in the Middle East for quite some time. Although he’s been a regular wandering through their streets spraying at will, we are under a certain level of self-delusion, believing our friends’ delicate scent receptors in their noses have long ago been burned out of their skulls, thus allowing us to tell them the gentle bouquet in the air is not our overly aromatic friend at it again. It’s time to pick a pair of rose-colored glasses from the garden.

Forgive me for my cynicism when it comes to statements regarding a ceasefire and pull out creating a “Middle East power vacuum”. I don’t believe the great sucking sound I’m hearing has anything do to the Middle East – it’s too deafening and has enough force to clean the lint out my wallet long after record high gas prices took care of the “dead presidents” that used to smile back at me. I think it’s coming from Washington. If I tune into the Weather Channel, I’m sure they’ll confirm the anomaly in the jet stream pattern sooner or later.

Second, we’re always after the punk kids in the neighborhood – any neighborhood. I don’t think we care if it’s our fight or not, we just like “in” so we don’t feel left out. Somehow we think if we can catch the fat kid wearing the purple striped shirt and the white fez propeller beanie, we can rehabilitate him. He doesn’t need rehabilitation – he simply wants to eat tomatoes in a salad instead of having to bathe in them after our foreign policy skunk wanders through and paints him like a laser target. He keeps asking us for the same thing over and over again, but we don’t listen. “Take your skunk home!” If the Arab world let their foreign policy skunk roam around and spray our kids, we would make a trip to the sporting goods store and buy a BB gun or a paintball gun and take it out in a blaze of glory. We’d be singing, “Praise the Lord, and pass the ammunition!” Why are we getting upset when they start resorting to the same tactics we would take? It’s because of our foreign policy skunk rules: 1. “do as I say and not as I do”, and 2. “do as we say and no one will get sprayed”.

Third, we like to call those punk kids with their Katyusha slingshots “extremists”. What have we taught our kids for years? “Don’t call people names”, and what do the handlers of our foreign policy skunk do? We insult our neighbors in public (“Islamofacists!”), and in private the less enlightened pass the around the juicy slurs we call you behind your back. In my personal experience, there’s nothing that endears me more to another member of the human race than being referred to in a derogatory fashion. It just warms the cockles of my heart and makes me want to go out of my way for that “special someone”. It’s becoming painfully obvious Dale Carnegie’s “How to Win Friends and Influence People” wasn’t on the required reading list inside the White House. Put down the Jerky Boys CD of prank telephone calls and step away from the diplomatic phonebook, please!

Fourth, the foreign policy skunk has a way of keeping people from the far edge of the garden where our dirty laundry hangs on the clothesline. To sneak a peek at our Christian right thong panties and their Israeli lace bras would be unthinkable – they would then realize the Stephen King of all horrors: we have our OWN extremists that can’t pump the skunk full of spray fast enough. We have to be honest and admit our hands are unclean and will not allow us to claim a moral high ground. As long as Pat Robertson continues to call for assassinations of the likes of President Chavez, it’s hard to point to the misguided in Islam and say with a straight face, “control you loose cannons!” especially in light of our free roaming foreign policy skunk doing his part to “smoke ‘em out of their holes”

Anyone who reads the “Talk Back” online comments on Haaretz.com (among other online Israeli news outlets) understands the amount of Jewish fanaticism blatantly out there for a world audience to read. We can pretend the pink elephant sitting at the diplomatic table isn’t there, but that doesn’t alter the reality it still wants peanuts. The pattern is all too common: anyone who disagrees with Israeli opinion is instantly labeled anti-Semitic and or racist. To point this out does not make me either of the above any more than eating at McDonald’s makes me a hamburger. It means we have to put down the mantle of political correctness and learn to speak the truth instead of lying like dogs.

The Evangelical Christian right has nothing to laugh about, either – we’re a blistering moral failure on every front and too busy admiring our designer “Emperor’s New Clothes” to realize we are poor, blind, wretched and naked. We supply weapons to our partner with equally dirty hands and then to add that special touch, our foreign policy skunk comes by and sprays each projectile like a male cat – as if the message being sent doesn’t stink enough to begin with.

We like to lean on our religion and say we don’t suicide bomb, fly planes into buildings or engage in human shield games, and that five dollars of self-righteousness will buy us a coffee at Starbucks. We also don’t follow the teachings of Christ Jesus. Instead we wrap ourselves up in the flag, sing patriotic songs, and erase the lines between politics and religion so there’s no accountability to God. We have violated one of the most basic tenets of our faith: “And do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. “ (Romans 12:2) We have jumped into bed with the politicians and given our Christian virtue away for free.

Evangelical Christians like pointing the finger at the Vatican and Rome when we read about “Mystery Babylon, the mother of all whores” who is “drunk with the blood of the martyrs”, but we desperately must look in the mirror and examine another possible truth: with every weapon we ship to our Israeli friends, aren’t we filling up our “cup of abominations” with the blood of innocent men, women and children? How much blood must be poured out and measured in the Middle East before we are as drunk as the whore we claim to despise?

We’re called to be the light of Christ and a witness to the world. Sadly, we’ve become an example of what not to do for God. As for being a light, we’re just as useless as a flashlight with dead batteries. “And why do you call Me Lord, Lord, and do not do what I say?” (Luke 6:46)

Fifth, that funky stench wafting over the TV airwaves can mean only one thing: our foreign policy skunk is touring the Sunday morning political talk shows and cable circuits attempting to release a hypnotic gas cloud of confusion. Last time this happened, we got snookered into Iraq by a very public media blitz showing us slick power point charts and tantalizing bits of “credible intelligence” which was later exposed as “operation: yellow cake” under the direction of the Secretary of Defense and the Vice President. (Pardon me while I put on this handy dandy gas mask so I don’t fall victim.) Now the same people are beating the drums for change in Iran. No thank you – I’ll pass on this steaming bowl of lies.

Americans like to believe we are well informed but we typically reference one local and one national source; we’re in the “information ghetto” and everyone but us knows it. “Free press” my foot – it is all calculated leaks and prepared sources designed to tell us what they want us to know. My Dad used to say, “pack half as many clothes as you’ll need, take twice as much money with you, and believe less half of what you read.”

Lastly, did you know our foreign policy skunk is a film aficionado? Imagine you’ve paid money to sit down and watch a movie in your local theatre. Half way through the film, “old white stripe” swaggers in on all fours like John Wayne, changes the film while his handlers proudly declare, “we know you’ll enjoy OUR film more!” Would you put up with that behavior? Certainly not! You paid your money and are expecting full faith value for it (unless the movie stinks, then you’re out of luck). Our government is forgetting there are people in the Middle East countries who are paying taxes to watch their government “film”, and we’ve got the brass to bust in, change the reel to “Democracy: American style!” and expect you to sit there quietly and watch it?

What’s “old white stripe” doing? He’s tossing our bacon into the fire and hanging out the “Open Season” sign on our backsides while simultaneously taking the heat off of Arab governments. Please explain to me why I should let someone plant their foot so deep in my behind that it’ll make people ask if I’m using Kiwi shoe polish as a breath mint, all in the name of taking someone else’s beating? The wisdom in this approach completely eludes me.

So here are the lessons of the foreign policy skunk:

• Don’t tell our neighbors they’re not smelling what we’re really selling. Honesty is the best policy, and it’s not like you don’t know where we live if we cheat you. It’s a small world, especially when you’re being chased through it.
• You spray your neighbors and they’ll get the fat kid with the purple shirt after you, and you’ll be lucky if he only eggs your house and loads the trees up with toilet paper.
• Stay out of fights that aren’t yours – no matter how fun they may look! A good steak is for barbequing, not for black eyes.
• If you leave your neighbors alone, they will have no beef with you – they’ll start going after their own governments.
• Wake up from the “we don’t have extremists” dream and face reality.
• Don’t use a translator to tell someone else, “we know what’s good for you” when if it wasn’t for their English language skills, you’d be resorting to a game of charades to communicate. It only go to show that you know nothing.
• All too often, we sabotage ourselves with faulty logic, fear and rhetoric, rendering ourselves unable or incapable of seeing through these timeless “the sky is falling!” chicken little political smoke screens.