So as I was reading my web news, I couldn't help but rejoice at the fact that the House of Reps is coming ever closer to creating yet another beautiful illegality, prohibiting that most violent and dangerous of activities: flag torching! Only lost by 1 vote this time. Next time the bill comes around, you can be sure that the hooligans who torture us nightly with their incessant flag desecration will be brought to account. Who hasn't been torn from his slumber at least once a week with a barrage of molotov cocktails stuffed with immolating American flags crashing through his bedroom window? Who in this great nation has not stumbled daily over a pile of smoldering Flag left on the sidewalk by the New York Times?

But then my infant mind, ranging about wildly as is its wont, pestered me with a troubling hypothetical scenario. Suppose the America haters began burning flags that were not American Flags per se, but were flags that merely depicted a representation of the American Flag, as in the image above? Good thing I got my skull-cap on, 'cause my brain be about to 'splode right now!

See these before-
and-after photos and behold the latest outrage of the liberal media. For the past 24 hours I have been perfectly content to live in what I now know is blissful ignorance of this cranial calamity -- this hideous and shameful metamorphosis. My charmingly naive peripheral vision and disdain of the vanity of mirrors had kept me from the evil apple of knowledge. But then the liberal digital media in the camera I found irresponsibily revealed to me and to the world that which can only demoralize me, encourage my enemies, and weaken our national resolve.

Only two hypotheses will account for these images. I am either (1) slowly evolving, through some bitter cosmic irony, into one of the Fisher-Price toys I have hitherto tortured in the moist and gummy crucible of my own maw; or (2) I have been enjoined as a Roman Legionnaire in our never-ending struggle against the Gauls.