The Problem With War Metaphors

Is that they make you sound crazy, and probably only serve to annoy the very people you’re ostentatiously trying to “help”:

Stringer sees public schools as the front lines in the battle.

As it stands, the onus is on school employees to detect bedbugs and call the city for help. Instead, Stringer wants the city to hire an army of inspectors and exterminators to search for and destroy the creatures.

“We’re forcing principals and teachers to act like CSI inspectors,” he said. “It’s like fighting a building fire with a garden hose.”

“You can’t fight this epidemic with a paltry, small army,” he said. “We’re in the middle of this bedbug war. We’ve already lost the Waldorf, we lost Lincoln Center, hundreds of residential buildings, and now we see we’re losing public schools.”

Isn’t Scott Stringer basically telling you not to patronize the Waldorf or Lincoln Center?

I’ve heard of grandstanding about food, grandstanding about museum exhibits, grandstanding about flight delays and even grandstanding about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen grandstanding about bed bugs. Can’t wait for that mayoral run.