Bill 'em Hillary

This is an open letter to the Islamist Republic of Iran. Hey Mahmoud, you know those three hikers you took into custody on the border with Iraq? Keep ‘em. I mean it. They’re all yours. If they’re dumb enough to go as “tourists” to Iraq and then go “hiking” along the border with Iran these people are either so incredibly stupid or so totally lacking in common sense that I don’t want them back.

I know those of you who are nicer people than I am are shocked, but really how much time do we want the State Department to spend on these Three Stooges? Yes, I’d feel very differently if they were my family and at least a little differently (maybe) if I actually knew them, but think about it. There’s still a war that we’re disentangling ourselves from in Iraq. We’ve already got out hands full with Iran trying to get them not to build a nuclear weapon, while they’ve got their hands full handling a popular uprising over the kind of election shenanigans that would have Newburyport’s Andrew J. “Bossy” Gillis or Boston’s James Michael Curley or Providence’s Buddy Cianci blush.

Then there’s the little matter of the shooting war in Afghanistan, the Arabs and the Israelis are still at each others throats, there’s those two little whack jobs in North Korea and Venezuela, and if that’s not enough a number of “first world” nations are still P-O’d at us over allowing our economy to go in the crapper and drag theirs along with it. I could go on because, as Sheldon Harnick put it in The Merry Minuet, “the whole world is festering with unhappy souls…” I think the State Department has more than enough to do than to have to deal with getting these three out of Iranian custody.

I’m an extreme case. I stay pretty close to the East Manchester Home for the Socially Inept most of the time. I make it a point to leave New England only once a year and then I only go as far as Upstate New York…for the Baseball Hall of Fame Induction. In the car on the way we refer to the drivers of other automobiles as “Bloody Pirates” until we are safely back in New England. We’ve managed to do this for several years without having to call New Hampshire’s Governor John Lynch to negotiate our release from the Empire State.

I’m aware that other people leave their neighborhood. I’m not sure why they do it but I know they do. But hiking on the Iraq – Iran border? What were you thinking? You couldn’t get a reservation at the Ritz Carlton in Gaza? Your back-up plan to have dinner in Darfur fell through at the last minute?

You want to go hiking? We’ve got some pretty good places right here in New England. I would suggest that these three people avoid hiking in New Hampshire though.

About nine years ago New Hampshire got tired of having to find hikers who were ill prepared for their excursions. So state law allows New Hampshire to charge hikers who are negligent, which a Massachusetts teenager recently found out when he got a bill for $25,000 after twisting his ankle and getting lost on Mount Washington last April. That’s an unusually high figure, the number is usually just a few hundred dollars, but it’s the concept we’re looking at here, not the figures. I suggest that the State Department take a page from New Hampshire’s law book.

Secretary Hillary Clinton’s minions should be keeping track of every hour they spend working to get the three sprung from Iran. I can’t imagine this would be a real hardship since many of them are probably lawyers, the rest are related to attorneys and we all know that practitioners of the law come with a meter hard-wired into their infrastructure – you know, like a taxi cab. Keep track of the “billable hours” and when Iran finally decides that it’s in Iran’s interest to let them return to the good old U.S.A. send them a bill for the time spent rescuing them from their own mountainous hubris.

By the way we, the United States, don’t actually talk directly to Iran, we have to use a middle man. In this case it’s the Swiss. I don’t know how much pro bono work the Swiss do, but I wouldn’t be surprised if their meter is already running.