Talk About Getting Tanked

I just finished reading a Reuters new story that makes me sad…that I can’t make up stuff this good. It’s like the ultimate Liz Lemon, only it was committed by the Russian Military. Apparently, one of their tanks ‘accidentally’ crashed into a house after the tank’s crew stopped at a local liquor store to buy more, you guessed it, vodka. The story says that the villager got film of a drunken tank driver trying to climb back into his tank holding 2 bottles of Vodka. Um, tell me again why we endured almost a half-century long cold war with these guys. In the ultimate case of a military cover up, the Russians said that the tank must have not been operating correctly and that it had fallen behind the group it was with on an exercise. Which begs the thought that if you are built like a tank, you SHOULD be exercising. OK, go ahead and let out that collective groan…I swear I would give something important like my left pinky finger to be able to dream up a story this good.

Seriously though, I guess the Red Army felt the mechanical failure statement was better than their original one, which was that the tank ‘slipped on ice.’ See, that’s the problem with living in Southern California because we don’t get to use the ‘slipped on the ice’ excuse. We do get to use the ‘I lost it in the sun excuse,’ but I guess that doesn’t always apply. I can’t really tell my boss that I lost the report due today in the sun (well I could, but my stellar credibility would fall faster than a NY governor caught in a high priced hooker scandal, theoretically of course), but I could say I slipped on the ice, got injured and was not able to type my report. So, I guess ice beats sun, assuming of course you live in a rock, papers, scissors type of world.

You have to admit that the image of a drunken tank commander wiping out the corner of a villager’s house does not quite create the cold war scare of the old days. See, if this happened in the US, our military would admit what happened, a congressional inquiry would be started to investigate why military vehicles are being used for beer runs and why the American military is buying Russian vodka instead of Tennessee whiskey or Kentucky bourbon.

CNN and C-Span would devote 24/7 coverage to it and call it something snappy like ‘tank-gate’ or ‘Liquor, In The Armed Forces’ (even though neither one of those are snappy, but after 10 minutes, I gave up and went with the only thing I could come up with) and they’d have a neat little logo already created. Political cartoonists would draw crashed military vehicles with famous drunks like Otis, the town drunk from Mayberry on The Andy Griffith Show or well, some other famous drunk whose name I can’t recall right now, stumbling out of the vehicle. Time magazine would place a crashed tank on its cover with the words ‘What Happened?’ on it. People would start wearing t-shirts that say ‘don’t blame me; I’m not a drunken tank commander.’ Late night talk show hosts would make DUI or ‘driving while tanked’ jokes. The entire country would become wrapped up in this story and the talk radio folks would have a heyday.

And then, on about the 5th straight day of ‘tank-gate,’ Paris would get arrested, Lindsey would go clubbing or Britney would leave her house and we’d forget all about it.

***And thanks to all those great bloggers that correctly pointed out that the way I used 'Liz Lemon' was not actually a verb...Boy did I pull a Michael Scott.***