Block That Metaphor

Roger L. Simon---der Mann mit dem Hut, as he's known to his millions of German fans (easy, I'm just kidding)---has a compelling vision of what our nation's transformative foreign policy project consists of:

Call me whatever you want, but don't call me late for the (democracy) lunch. Put another way, in the words of Chairman Deng Tsaio Peng, "I don't care if a cat is black or white, only that it catches mice." (Yes, I've quoted this before, but it's a great quote.) The mouse we must catch is democracy.

Christ, where to begin. First democracy is lunch. Then it's prey. I have no idea what sort of meals are served at the Simon household, but I think it's more likely than not that Simon's conflation of what people eat and what cats eat is just coincidence. Still, the message is clear: As a nation, we must arrive on time to track and hunt down democracy (taking care not to be distracted by the bits of yarn, I guess, that are the critics of America's foreign policy), and then we must eat it. EAT DEMOCRACY. Or the terrorists win.