Slap, Slap, Slap
Feel that, Kenny? They're painting a target on your butt!
by Tamara Baker

March 29, 2003 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (apj.us) -- Slap, slap, slap.

Kenneth Adelman, who sits on the Defense Policy Board with fellow PNAC and Rumsfeld buddy Richard Perle, is having odd dreams lately.

Slap, slap, slap.

He doesn't remember the dreams when he wakes up -- not really. They hang at the edge of his memory, strange powerful, paradoxically fleeting yet insistent.

Slap, slap, slap.

They involve cans of red paint, paintbrushes wielded by persons he thought were his friends, and concentric red circles being formed, wetly, on his butt.

Slap, slap, slap.

It's not that he did anything wrong, mind you. He only said what everyone else at the Project for the New American Century -- Rummy, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, the whole gang -- was thinking. You know, about invading Iraq being a "cakewalk" and everything. Heck, they still think that, and so does he. All the Kool Kids do.

Slap, slap, slap.

Damn, those bristles itch.

But now, what with the Eye-Rack-Eees daring to defend their own country and all, and what with the supply lines being tough to defend and all, and a few dozen American and Brit troops -- not to mention a few hundred Iraqi soldiers and civilians, but they don't count -- suddenly it's no longer OK to use the word "cakewalk" anymore. Even though they were all using it earlier. But he, Kenneth Adelman, was the first one to use it in front of the media, so he gets the flak.

Everyone else has "deniability" -- or think they do.

Slap, slap, slap.

Even prominent Republicans like Robert Novak -- jeezo peezo, Mister Rove, didn't you whip him into line months ago? -- are now going after the "cakewalk" predictions. Novak's one of the guys drawing the target on Adelman's hiney -- though, to be fair, he's not exactly sparing the hineys of the other PNAC chickenhawks.

Which is precisely why they're going to have to make an example of Adelman. He, after all, "started it." If they can make him take a bullet for the team, they can get away scot-free. No one will question them. Everyone will assume that Adelman was running rogue. Right?

Slap, slap, slap.