Low hanging fruit

I apologize for following up a rant about the town all the surviving kids from The Lord of the Flies moved to with another rant ripped from the headlines but this was hard to resist. The brilliant comedian Jay Leno called politics show business for ugly people and apparently the military, at least the top brass, has become a category of show business for people of another sort as well.

The Air Force's top leadership sought for three years to spend counterterrorism funds on "comfort capsules" to be installed on military planes that ferry senior officers and civilian leaders around the world, with at least four top generals involved in design details such as the color of the capsules' carpet and leather chairs, according to internal e-mails and budget documents.

Don't ask and don't tell anybody General but I have some fabulous swatches and color samples you should see. What course at the academy covers this?

Air Force documents spell out how each of the capsules is to be "aesthetically pleasing and furnished to reflect the rank of the senior leaders using the capsule," with beds, a couch, a table, a 37-inch flat-screen monitor with stereo speakers, and a full-length mirror.

Who do these guys think they are, congressmen?

The internal Air Force e-mails, provided to The Washington Post by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO), a nonprofit Washington group, and independently authenticated, make it clear that lower-ranking officers involved in the project have been pressured to create what one described as "world class" accommodations exceeding the standards of a regular business-class flight.

"I was asked by Gen. [Robert H.] McMahon what it would take to make the [capsule] . . . a 'world class' piece of equipment," an officer at the service's Air Mobility Command said in a March 2007 e-mail to a colleague, referring to the mobility command's top officer then. "He said he wanted an assurance . . . that we would be getting a world class item this week."

I can't wait to see how they've tricked out their Humvees when they tool up to the red, white and blue carpet at the Military Awards Dinner to pick up their Patsy. The Patsy, short for Patriot, is the award given to the best military procurement officer every year. It is a gold statue of a naked taxpayer covering ambiguous genitalia with an empty wallet.

Maybe we could drop a few of these comfort capsules on insurgents, preferably with the Brass strapped in and see what effect that has on morale. Its good to see the Pentagon has gotten the word about fiscal responsibility and stopped buying those $500 dollar hammers and toilet seats.