“Flat Daddy”

I think we may have finally fallen off the edge of reason in the war on Terror. American military families now have cardboard cut outs of Daddy to keep at home while he is away fighting for oil. Note the glee the family show in having a ‘Flat Daddy’ to take to ball games and family outings. I suppose asking for Daddy to actually come home and sending the cardboard cut out to Iraq to get shot at would be asking too much?

(CBS) It has been more than three years since the U.S. military sent troops to the Middle East. There are still hundreds of thousands of service members deployed there — leaving their families missing them terribly.

Jennifer Bailey's husband, Craig, is a member of the Maine National Guard serving at Kuwait's camp Navistar, and he likely won't be home until next summer.

Thanks to a popular family-support program run by the Maine National Guard, he is never far from his family's thoughts. The program supplies life-size cutouts of deployed service members to relatives back home.

"As you know couples do the announcements here and I wouldn't be a couple without Craig, our flat daddy," Jennifer Bailey told The Early Show's Hannah Storm. "I'm so glad he's here, and he had a face lift. He looks really nice today."
There are about 200 flat daddies and mommies in Maine, and they do just about everything with their families. Craig Bailey's flat daddy attends church regularly and, on the back of flat daddy, Jennifer keeps a log of everywhere he's been. They bring him to events that the real Craig Bailey would attend if he were at home, like his son's football games.