Golf News for Thursday, May 8, 2008 | Daily Golf Blogs

Tim McDonald: American airlines stink! Congress needs to open our skies to European airlines

The differences between commercial airlines in America and everywhere else in the world, including Africa, Asia, Antarctica and any other continent they happen to find would fill a Super Wal Mart.

American planes are dingy, grubby and probably contagious. There's an air of desolation as soon as you walk into the cabin. It's like being locked away in a Mexican jail on trumped-up drug charges.

The seats were designed by midgets, for midgets. A chimp might be comfortable, but only if he were a very small, tranquilized baby chimp who didn't mind sitting erect, like a granite statue, and did not require food, water or air.

U.S. airlines charge you for every inedible fake-foodstuff they have the gall to try and feed you. The only free entertainment airlines in the U.S. have is that game you play where you try and keep from getting a disease.

European airlines gleam like diamonds, with bright, pretty colors. They smell like rose gardens and the stewardesses are happy people with beautiful smiles, whose only purpose on earth is to make you feel like a rock star.

They have something called "economy extra," for us people who aren't rich enough for business-class but don't want to mingle with the hobos back in economy. The seats are wide, cushy and luxurious; you can stretch out like the Sultan of Dubai and have dreams of conquest and sexual pleasure.

You don't have to play forearm wars with the fat, hairy goon sitting next to you, reeking of Old Crow and stale peanuts.

European airlines bring you good food and plenty of it. And free alcohol! They let you watch free movies, good ones.

I just completed a 24-hour journey from Denmark to Florida and the only delay I experienced was as soon as I got back in the U.S. The Continental flight was delayed about an hour and a half and, wouldn't you know it, I was stuck in Newark, New Jersey, surely the armpit of the Milky Way.

There was another delay after we finally arrived – there was no one at the gate to let us in!!

By the time I got off the plane, I was a small, rolled-up ball of defeated and humiliated humanity. By contrast, when I disembarked a European flight, I felt like a young turk striding confidently across the planet into a bright, fine morning.

There is an issue pending in Congress involving the ability of European airlines to compete in U.S. domestic market.

I beseech every member of Congress to LET THEM IN!

Those who vote against it should be doomed to spend an hour in Newark.

Why not more?

Even after all I've been through, I couldn't do that to another human being.

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