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Back in the saddle again

Phillipe And Jorge

It’s not brain surgery

“Just take a little off the top.”
 
Whew, don’t say that at Rhode Island Hospital these days or you might come home holding the upper part of your cranium in your hand. Trepan this, baby!
 
As we know, two patients at the hospital have experienced wrong-site neuro-mistakes in the last four months, a bit more than the American Medical Association’s preferred average — never mind the preference of a patient who expects a surgeon to know left from right.
 
Fortunately, the latest gaffe was stopped, according to the Other Paper, after a doctor had started to cut into the patient’s head, but before the physician reached the skull.
 
Phillipe & Jorge are advised that the hospital gift shop is now stocking duct tape and marking pens, so that patients can self-prep for upcoming operations by sticking a taped “X marks the spot” on the correct side of their heads prior to going under the knife.

Bush family values
Everyone knows how close the Bush family is with the wonderful Saudi Arabian royal rulers. What are friends for, after all? Never mind that the majority of the 9/11 terrorists were Saudis.
 
Yes, the Bushes and the Saudis royals — a match made in hell, since both have a penchant for condoning torture on their fellow human beings. Whether they get a perverse erotic kick out of it, we don’t know, but P+J think there must be some explanation.
 
Here’s an excerpt from Thomas Friedman’s November 25 column in the New York Times: “One of the most talked about stories last week came out of Saudi Arabia, where the government [take a bow, Bush buddies] affirmed the sentence of 200 lashes for a 19-year-old Shiite girl who was sitting in a car with a male acquaintance last year when they were attacked by seven men who gang-raped them both.”
 
Ouch. And why hideously whip the female rape victim? Because she was guilty of “illegal mingling,” according to Saudi’s little Taliban-esque laws, by having sat in a car with a male who was not related to her. Like that, ladies? Needless to say, nary a peep out of 1600 Pennsylvania about this disgusting story, and God forbid that Dubya should dare insult his swarthy pals by bringing it up.
 
It reminds P+J of sad, old elitist cow Barbara Bush’s circa 2003 remark, around the beginning of her son’s falsely justified war in Iraq, when our brave but now dead soldiers started arriving home: “Why should we hear about body bags and deaths,” she said on ABC’s Good Morning America. “Oh, I mean, it’s not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?” Your compassionate conservatism and “beautiful,” if empty and twisted, mind were certainly handed down to your sickening son, Barbara.