Foodie Friday II

Braised dishes are often autumnal or wintry, full of deep, caremalized flavors, mellow, earthy root vegetables, spices, and dark wine. But braising can also be a great way to prepare summer foods, and in hot weather it's one of the better ways to cook indoors, since you can cook in one pot on a single burner on the stovetop. The flavor-mellowing that comes with slow cooking also serves well the bright, acidic, and piquant flavors of summer fare.

Lamb Shank Ragoût

Lamb shanks are relatively cheap cuts, as they are bony and contain a high portion of fat, tendon, and gristle, and their meat is somewhat tougher than other cuts of the lamb. They're ideal and economical for a braise, however, as the bone and marrow inside will flavor the cooking liquid as the meat braises and help bring out an intensity of flavor. In this dish, the lamb is first marinated in spices, citrus zest, and yogurt, and then braised without browning in the manner of a tagine or other slow-cooked French-Moroccan dish.

INGREDIENTS
3-4 lamb shanks (about .75 lbs per)
sheep's milk yogurt
whole spices (cumin, fennel or anise seed, allspice, clove, coriander)
cayenne pepper
lemons
limes
onion
shallot
garlic
whole canned tomatoes (or fresh, in season, peeled)
fresh thyme, rosemary, and flat-leaf parsley
sea salt
black pepper

Using a thin, very sharp knife (I find a paring knife works well) remove the thin, translucent outer later of the meat, and then cut away any large pieces of fat. No need to be too zealous trimming the fat, however, as whatever you leave will render into the cooking liquid later on. Season the meat lightly with salt and pepper and set aside.

Grind your spices by hand in a mortar and pestle. I use cumin, fennel seed, allspice, one clove, coriander, and some pre-powdered cayenne. Rub the meat thoroughly with the spice mixture. Put several spoonfuls of yogurt into a bowl. Mix in the zest of one small lime and a half of a lemon. Put the lamb in the bowl, coat it with the yogurt mixture, cover with plastic wrap, and place in the fridge for several hours or overnight.

The braising liquid is simply prepared. Finely dice an onion, a large shallot (or a couple small), and several cloves of garlic. Sweat them out slowly over a low-medium heat in your brasing dish. Remember, you are trying to preserve the brightness of flavor here, not produce a hearty, wintery meal, so you want to avoid browning and caremalizing. At the proper temperature, the onions and shallots should slowly turn translucent, and the liquid from them should be visible on the bottom of the pan. Add a large can of whole tomatoes. (With the exception of seasonal tomatoes in August and early September, good canned tomatoes are almost always superior in quality and taste to the pale, watery things sold in the produce section. A good rule of thumb: as with any fruit, the best sense to test a tomato's ripeness is your nose. Does it smell like a tomato? If it does, it's got flavor. If it smells like nothing, it will taste like the garnish on your omelette plate at Denny's.) Add a bouquet garni of thyme, rosemary, and flat-leaf parsely. Add the juice of one lemon and one lime. Finally, I like to add a dry, fruity white wine--perhaps a French Riesling or even a Gruner Veltliner. Just a cup or so will do. Or, if you want something a little more unusual, acidic, and Mediterranean, find yourself some verjuice (less--3/4 cup will do).

While making the braise, take the meat from the fridge so it can come to room temperature. When the liquid has just come to a boil, wipe the meat of its yogurt marinade (again, no reason to go crazy getting at every bit) and place the shanks in the liquid. Reduce the heat, bring the pot to a simmer, cover, and let it cook until the meat falls from the bone--four to six hours, depending on the volume.

After the meat has come of the shank bones, remove the bones and the bouquet garni from the pot. With kitchen tongs and a fork, you'll want to shred loose chunks of meat in the pan, as you'd do with something like a pulled pork. Then bring up the heat so the sauce is almost boiling and cook it uncovered for a little while longer to evaporate excess liquid and thicken the ragoût.

Serve this dish over an unadorned cous-cous, polenta, or other grain, and top it with a young, salty cheese. Feta would do, but if you can get a good Italian Frisolo, even better.

Language Lessons

"Embolden" sounds like a brand-name fiber drink for the elderly, and when used to speak of men and nations surely indicates the stinking presence of precisely the sort of thing that brand-name fiber drinks are meant to stem.

The Enemy of My Enemy Remains My Enemy, Despite the Application of this Aphorism

"It's time to start thinking cold-bloodedly about what we might yet eke out of Iraq." So begins Fred Kaplan at Slate, and up go my eyebrows as I wonder what other adverb in our modifier-rich native tongue describes our current and former thinking.

The new plan, which involves giving guns to Sunni insurgents so that they can fight "jihadists" after extracting promises--sure to be honored!--that they won't kill Americans, is really quite extraordinary. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." I mean, really? I mean, are you sure? I mean, dude, Kaplan, brotherman, is it not in fact the case that the enemy of my enemy is the enemy of both of us? Because it seems to me that this can't-walk-and-chew-bubble-gum idea of the insurgency is predicated on the dangerously retarded notion that there is a finite amount of enmity in occupied Iraq.

That, friends, is clearly not the case.

Sons of Saul

Remarkably, a few of the usual biases are absent from this WaPo article, which revisits the last five years of George Bush in not-Palestine, a series of decisions as disastrously stupid, pig-headed, and willfully uninformed as any other in the recent history of the American goverment. And that, as they say, is saying something.

Now the favored rhetorical program of the American left, which involves paeans to the idea of the United States as an "honest broker" of the territorial dispute, deserves its own abundance of skepticism. How do you broker honestly between an over-populated, under-developed, refugee non-state and a nuclear-armed American protectorate at the receiving end of $4 billion in annual military aid? The idea of officiating such a dispute as a neutral arbitrator is as absurd as the idea of officiating a game between the Spurs and your old Jr. Varsity basketball squad. You can call 'em like you see 'em, and you can guarantee a clean game, but you can't affect an equitable outcome by enforcing fairness because the whole setup is unfair.

Nevertheless, the last six years have shown an American policy--in the loosest usage of the word--almost Oedipal in its uncanny ability to choose precisely the most escalatory, doomed route of action at every juncture--to do so with such overweening pride and to respond to failure with such incredulity that it descends in the end, as do so many of the great tragedies, into a bloody, absurdist farce. What I am saying, in short, is that the great shortcoming of the Bush administration is dramaturgical.

However: See also, Jonathan Schwarz.

Salon de cons

So let's pop over to The National Review and see what they're jawing at.

Well, Michael Graham explains that "When Massachusetts state legislators convene this afternoon to consider a proposed constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, they will weigh the most fundamental principles of democracy itself[.]" Alas, the sentence continues without frottage. Victor Davis Excelsior Enterprise Galactica Hyperion Millenium Falcon Hanson is in not once, but twice. In the first, he explains that "An alien from Mars would almost instantly diagnose the problem of the Palestinians from simply listening to their inane apologists," which seems very odd. How are we to know that Martians do not prize inane apologetics as we prize the oratorios of Handel, the paintings of Goya, the poetry of Goethe? But more importantly, what is it with Victor, Martians, and the travails of the Palestian non-state? In the second piece, Victor puts his ear to the earth like an Indian and diagnoses the distant rumble of an immigrant stampede. He frets:

In the frontline American southwest, entire apartheid communities and enclaves within cities have sprung up whose distinct language, culture and routines are beginning to resemble more the tense divides in the Balkans or Middle East than the traditional melting pot of multiracial America.

Now I have heard this cry before, and what I want to know is just why the fuck these people think it's called Chinatown. With a name like Victor Davis Hanson, one presumes a certain paucity of strange holiday traditions and interesting cuisines in the faimily tree, but the history of the IOZ clan is a history of Little Italys, Little Russias, Little Ukraines, Little Germanys, and from the front grille of Dad's ultimate driving machine to the back-end of Uncle John's law firm, the later generations turned out not only fine, but perfectly fluent in the predominant language of their native land.

James S. Robbins reminds us that "every day is flag day," recalling the glorious day in 1916 when that posh old white supremacist, Woodrow Wilson, strode around Washington in a martial parade before standing in front of Washington's towering phallus to inveigh against "hyphenated Americans" and sing a jingle in praise of war. (One notes a certain . . . leitmotif.) But by far the most curious thing is this:


Is a tree an airplane? Is a cloud a star? What weighs more, a ton of feathers or a ton of bricks? Are you my mother?

Bodhi

GENERAL BUCK TURGIDSON: General Ripper called Strategic Air Command headquarters shortly after he issued the go code. I have a partial transcript of that conversation if you'd like me to read it.

PRESIDENT MERKIN MUFFLEY: Read it.

TURGIDSON: The duty officer asked General Ripper to confirm the fact the he had issued the go code and he said, "Yes gentlemen, they are on their way in and no one can bring them back. For the sake of our country and our way of life, I suggest you get the rest of SAC in after them, otherwise we will be totally destroyed by red retaliation. My boys will give you the best kind of start, fourteen hundred megatons worth, and you sure as hell won't stop them now. So let's get going. There's no other choice. God willing, we will prevail in peace and freedom from fear and in true health through the purity and essence of our natural fluids. God bless you all." Then he hung up. We're still trying to figure out the meaning of that last phrase, sir.

MUFFLEY: There's nothing to figure out General Turgidson. This man is obviously a psychotic.

TURGIDSON: Well, I'd like to hold off judgment on a thing like that, sir, until all the facts are in.

MUFFLY: [anger rising] General Turgidson, when you instituted the human reliability tests, you assured me there was no possibility of such a thing ever occurring.

TURGIDSON: Well I don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip-up sir.

So the FBI has--whoops!--in hundreds or thousands of instances peeped more than it should, and lest you think that this was merely the overzealotry of our Terror-besotted age, it appears that these excesses occured for no real reason at all. This is sort of the Murphy's Law for your basic faganarchotarian: anything the government can do wrong, it will do wrong.

This is also why I chuckle mordantly when I hear good, antiwar liberals regurgitating the line that says Terrorism is about law enforcement, about police. As opposed to the war metaphor. As if there's a difference. The modern surveillance state is a sophisticated semiotician. It maintains all sorts of distinctions while unfailingly acting toward its own institutional imperative, which is to know every goddamn thing about everyone. The cops, the FBI, the national guard, the army--state security is state security is state security. Repeat it like a mantra and escape the eternal cycle of American electoral politics.

Eureka!

I have watched with amusement and a degree of self-satisfaction as always-late-to-the-party liberals run herd-like toward the realization that America is not leaving Iraq. Certain pwogglers, the titanic Atrios among them, realized this quite some time ago, and have even written about it, but for the most part the idea that American military intervention in a foreign nation might be open-ended seems entirely novel to the pwogglesphere, which in typical fashion responds by obsessing over how the next election will be the most imporant event since evolution lowered our biological progenitors' larynxes and gave us the full potential to speak. Through the fog of their outrage, one detects a faint outline of principle, but that chimera disappears quickly in the full light of reality. Take for instance the absolute outrage that George W. Bush should compare Iraq to Korea. "Why," cries the pwoggler, "That means we'll be in Iraq for FIFTY YEARS!"

And at this signpost, they stop, although the road unfurls yet into the distance. If it's indeed so outrageous that Americans soldiers will still be staggering around Iraq a half-century from now, and it is, then shouldn't the next thought meander toward the question of what precisely we're doing in South Korea, in Okinawa, at Ramstein, and everythefuckwhereelse in the motherfuckingworld? It should, but instead the pwogglesphere rushes ever-headlong into the comforting embrace of a mainsteam Donkle candidate who circumlocutes on the issue of just how many troops will remain in Iraq after their vapid withdrawal schemes, and who otherwise preaches the evangel of American's right and holy duty to poke its well-armed nose into any country it pleases, variously phrased as "regaining America's power and prestige" or "reclaiming America's leadership role in the world," or "restoring America's position," as if these fraught pacification efforts in the badlands of empire were mere hillocks in the ongoing, road-trip story of America, that scrappy character forever getting into scrapes and getting out of them, then solving the mystery, kissing the girl, pocketing the prize money, and heading homeward to the tune of Richard Hageman's theme for Stagecoach. There are by my count two-and-a-half candidates willing to broach the serious topic of dismantling our imperium. One is a long-shot Republican with a regrettable distaste for the Gay; one of them is a bankrupt Alaskan Cassandra who has followed his bliss to the Democratic primary; the half is Dennis K., who is half-serious and half-stooge, dismayingly willing to be used by his party as a lure as they fish for lefty voters. Your basic pwoggler will instead sign on with Hillary or Obama, gratify himself with the thought that he voted for a chick or a black dude, and wax indignant in three years when Hillary decides to cruise-missilize Lesser Whatthefuckistan in the name of the women, the children, and America's heroin babies and the GOP resumes expounding a philosophy of placid isolation. "Hypocrites!" will be the cry. Someone will write an angry essay on DailyKos. The fellow who runs that Daily Howler site will remind us that Al Gore never once mentioned earth tones. Gravel will be forgotten; Ron Paul will be ignored; Dennis Kucinich will be remembered as a punchline; and the Donkle's fervid allies will content themselves with the thought that in two years an even greater Donkle majority will finally let them "govern," finally let them "get things done."

And a Partridge in a Pear Tree

1. I will keep America on offense in the Terrorists’ War on Us.

James Joyner says most of the funny and true things that one can say about Benito Giuliani's "12 Committments," which sounds frightfully Newt Gingrichian with its arbitrary numerology, though it also sounds like the working title of a Merchant-Ivory picture. But this first committment . . . there's something very odd about it.

Perhaps it's the possessive plural that sits awkwardly, or perhaps it's the goofy prepositional phrase, "on offense," a clumsy rephrasing of the more properly idiomatic "on the offensive." Probably it's "War on Us," combined with the plurally possessive "Terrorists'." It jangles like an overburdened key ring.

I understand the rhetorical legerdemain here--a rather crass attempt to cast "Terrorists" as the aggressors and Americans as the beleaguered victims of their boundless cruelty. (Why then not "War on America?" Presumably we're mostly aware of the country in which we live.) But the attempt is wasted by the countermanding "on offense" of the preceding phrase. If they're at War on Us, aren't we necessarily on the defensive? Or is Benito Giulianai suggesting, par contre the conniption he suffered at Ron Paul's suggestion that our enemies think we had it coming, that like football this game began with a kind of coin-flip, everafter alternating between offense and defense, and somewhere in the middle changing the direction of play?

Today In The Victims of Communism Memorial News

The Victims of Communism Memorial was dedicated yesterday, and other than the usual utterances of "Islam is the next Lenin," a talisman fingered so compulsively by the officials of the American empire that only a nub of skin-smoothed wood remains, there came this common bit of the imperial liturgy:

The ceremony was held on the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan's famous speech at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, when he implored Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." Two years later, the wall fell.

Now this would be fine, if equally silly, in the ongoing reification of Ronald Reagan by the America political establishment, but stuck in the middle of straight news written in "local interest" style, it's a little odd, and I suspect that our reporter cribbed it from a speech and failed to show it as paraphrase. It reads as if Reagan's words quite literally echoed through the years and crashed against the Berlin Wall in a great sonic hammerblow. But surely that's not the case, is it?

The tone of the gathering seemed largely boosterish, somehow Rotarian, and quite likely to decline into a cookout or clambake immediately afterward. Just as you can imagine the luminaries of some sleepy Maryland town on the far side of the Chesapeake drinking domestic lager amidst the wreckage of a thousand cruelly boiled blue crabs, having just witnessed the mayor taking the first ceremonial shovel-full of the earth that would hold the town's newest tree, you could imagine this passel of bad-suited men in solid ties loosening up and playing a game of softball notable mostly for its pale legs and funny styles of baserunning. Our capital is undeniably low-rent, and even the fancy balls and state dinners have a certain air of a fire-hall wedding about them. It has occasionally been said that men of skill, wisdom, and character do not go into politics, and that may be the case, but in my observation the most uniform abstentions from the practically political are men of taste.

Breaking News

Iran is going to blow up the moon.

You heard it here first.

Im In Ur Reconstrucshun, Carpetbaggin On Yer Wimynz

Here is something that I have been unable to discover in the coverage of Genarlow Wilson's ordeal: What color was the chick who gave the blowjobs?

Of course, I would never cast aspersions on the race-blind, color-blind, need-blind, duck-blind sentiments of America's Just Folks, let alone a DA in Georgia, so I am asking this question strictly incidentally, strictly tangentially, strictly novelistically, just, you know, for the detail, and not because it is at all germane.

Workers of the World, Disunite!

An astute reader of this humble blog points my attention to a new project that will memorialize the victims of communism with what appears to be a wedding-cake ornament done in the Soviet Realist style.



And I know you're wondering what I'm wondering: Where are they going to put the gift shop?

Now by chance, today is the day that the memorial will be dedicated. Afterward, at a "gala dinner" at the J.W. Marriott (further proof that D.C. is socially a very tacky city), something called the Truman-Reagan Medal of Freedom will be presented to William F. Buckley, Jr. and the late Scoop Jackson by Joe Lieberman himself. There are at least ten silly things about this setup, but for the sake of brevity, I will confine myself to three. First: Imagine someone offering an honor called, oh, the Martin Luther King, Jr.-Eldridge Cleaver Award. Second: Scoop Jackson, the Senator for Boeing, has been dead for twenty-four years. Third: None of the honorees, so far as I'm able to ascertain, are or were "victims of communism." And I ask you, is there not one Chinese or Russian, long-since released from a work camp, having settled in the United States, achieved citizenship, and reliably voted Republican, who could wheel onto the stage and show us a scar, at least, or the tremble in his hands?

Oops

This charming tale of US Troops killing the fuck out of a bunch of Afghani policemen serves as a useful counterpoint to the melody of empire. It reminds us that though writ large and epic as a billion bases in a million little countries all around across the universe, much of the day-to-day operation in the restive provinces consists of slack-jaws who can't tell a Pashtun from a poodle driving around in Hummers and shooting things. Also, it involves "calling in air support." Look at this picture. That is one blown-the-fuck-up police outpost.

I think it's illustrative of the casual, if not wanton, destruction that follows The Troops™ wherever they roam. Putting firearms into the hands of pig-ignorant children whom you wouldn't otherwise trust with a Eurorail pass, and then turning them loose on a far more foreign, more dangerous place to create order out of dust and fervent hope is the formula for exactly this sort of tragedy masquerading as farce.

Fairy Tales

The classic tale of "US Warns Iraq that Progress Is Needed Soon," re-staged in Your Very Office.

BOSS: I needed those numbers yesterday.

EMPLOYEE: Uh, didn't I give that to you already?

BOSS: Those were first quarter figures. I asked you for those three months ago.

EMPLOYEE: No, no, I'm pretty sure those were what you asked for.

BOSS: They weren't.

EMPLOYEE: Wait. Let me go back through my Sent box to see if I can find that attachment.

BOSS: Just send me the report, okay?

EMPLOYEE: Man, the network is really slow today. Are you having any trouble with your email?

BOSS: No.

EMPLOYEE: Jeez, it's slow. It won't search.

BOSS: I want that report on my desk first thing tomorrow.

EMPLOYEE: Hang on. Hang on. I think it's frozen. Shit. I'm going to have to call IT.

BOSS: Just put the numbers in the damned spreadsheet and bring me a hard copy.

EMPLOYEE: All the numbers are in my email, and my email is, like, totally frozen. I'll just send down a trouble ticket, I guess. I'm sure they'll be up later today.

BOSS: Use your laptop. Go to Starbucks. I don't care. Just do it.

EMPLOYEE: I left my laptop on the back seat of the car, and my wife drove me today.

BOSS: [Disgusted, turns to leave, saying over his shoulder] Tomorrow morning.

EMPLOYEE: No problem, boss. [Waits until Boss is out of earshot. Stands up and looks over his cubicle partition. Says to COWORKER] Did you hear that shit?

COWORKER: Totally. What a dick.

EMPLOYEE: Yeah. What an asshole.

COWORKER: He's such an asshole.

EMPLOYEE: Total asshole. I can't believe he got promoted. Did you hear him? I'm like, "Sorry, Boss, my email's really slow today," and he's like, "I don't care."

COWORKER: Yeah. You can't help it if your email is slow.

EMPLOYEE: Yeah, it's not my fault. Dick.

COWORKER: Total dick.

EMPLOYEE: Yeah. Fuck him. I'm never going to give him that report.

COWORKER: I thought you said you already gave it to him.

EMPLOYEE: What? Oh, no. I gave him some bullshit from last quarter.

COWORKER: Oh, shit dude. That's awesome.

EMPLOYEE: That douche took like three days to figure it out, even.

COWORKER: What a dick.

EMPLOYEE: Totally. What a fucking asshole.

Hit Parade

On its face, Anne Applebaum's column is op-ed boilerplate, the standardized, otiose lamenting of all who fail to share the columnist's obsessions. It's a familiar genre: Nicholas Kristof tells you that you're a bad person for not swimming across the ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, and then trekking overland to Darfur, the whole while carring a thousand pounds of rice and wheat on your back, as Kristof himself does every summer; Tom Friedman tells you that computer engineers are the fountain of youth where there used to be an oil well that laid golden eggs that hatched into crocodiles which are successful start-ups and elephants which are declining old-economy legacies; Maureen Dowd told you that she can't believe that's what you're wearing; Charles Krauthmammer muttered about a mineshaft gap; Peter Beinart furiously stroked his little weiner and screamed, "Close the door! Don't look at me! Don't you ever knock?"; Jonah Goldberg wallowed neck-deep in his watering hole, for though awkward on land, in the water he is beautiful.

Despite its familiar form, something about Applebaum's routine stuck in my ear, and I think I've diagnosed the discord. If you ignore the embarrassingly plaintive editorializing, you'll find Applebaum narrating a history along these lines: In the moments immediately following 9/11, shocked, saddened, and afraid, the world, by which is meant something like "those inclined to agree with us anyway," was united by what seemed like a unique and overriding concern, a "brief moment of consensus [...] when the world's most powerful governments all believed that the world's worst problem was international terrorism." In the intervening years, the world's worst problem has re-diminished somewhat in our allies' estimations and is now one among a constellation of global problems, which include climate, poverty, disease, agriculture, and the high-larious hijinks of Russia's very own king of the one-liner, Vladimir Putin.

As she scolds us all for taking our eyes off the prize, she says, "Most of all, though, the world's divided attention proves once again that global Internet access and global television have not created anything resembling a global conversation." And by "global conversation," yes, she does mean "unanimity." This I find odd--the absolute conviction that if only people talked it out and, you know, really thought about it, they would inevitable and inexorably come to precisely the same conclusions as our humble columnist. I think we can reasonably assume that international terrorism remains high on the list of concerns for all the attendees of the G-8 summit. Non-state actors, as goes the not-so-neologism, don't bode well for the state's force monoply, and without that, the state is just a particularly well-funded and well-armed gang in a world of armed gangs. So it's not a question of whether or not all these fine folks agree broadly that terrorism is in the Top 40, but that they don't explicitly affirm Applebaum's judgment that it ought to be topping the charts, and if you're not buying, you're not listening.

Paris

It is the season for the highest harumphery, and Paris Hilton proves it. The purpose of her stay-release-stay-some-more in jail is to allow good Americans to widen their eyes in mock disbelief at every juncture and express profound moral indignation that this made-for-television event was made for television in the first place. Why, there is a war on, and starving and killing in Sudan, and China Rising, and India gaining, and an antenuclear Iran just itching to overthrow Middle Earth. And surely all America would be paying rapt attention to these very issues, poring over the reports, carefully comparing and contrasting news stories, pondering the veracity of anonymously sourced claims, investigating the history of the Persian peoples, were it not for the singular, übermenschian effort of Paris Hilton to interpose her reptilian mug between Important Events and the covering cameras.

Since Americans evidently want to understand why it is that this chick who lives so beyond their means and capacity to imagine luxury so captivates their small, plain imaginations, I shall oblige with an explanatory note. Paris Hilton is America. Stupid, heedless, rich but not as rich as she beleieves, unhealthier than she likes to admit, casually destructive, immune to remorse, desirous of consequences for those who cross her but unable to contemplate that she should have to face any herself, acquisative, profligate, manipulative, needy, juvenile, boorish, proud, self-righteous, self-pitying, self-absorbed, and self-destructive. Her brief respite from the first real punishment of her life is the pause at the peak of the wave before the ship's keel falls sickeningly toward the trough. She's not a movie, she's a mirror.

How Many Times Do I Gotta Tell Ya

Now more than half a year past The Most Important Elections Ever In Our Lifetimes Ever™, we find ourselves in the gloaming of Donkle effervesence. In an odd mash of metaphor, the slow dawning of the understanding that the congressional Democrats are going to do fuck-all to undo the worst excesses of the past six years has brought on the sunset of their adorable conviction that La Nan and the Fighting 110th are going to sweep in like brooms in a Disney flick. The betrayal, perfectly predictable to anyone without a vested committment to the triumph of the Air-War faction of the War Party, begins and ends with military policy--"So, when you say 'permanent base,' you mean, like, permanent?"--but it's in the small venalities that it's most accutely felt by the faithful. (Imagine if Luther had kicked off his post-Theses Reformation with a fire-sale of indulgences.)

Here, one of the doyennes of internet Donkledom, notices that her own party is selling all the future non-virgins of America down the river with continued funding for some whack-o collection of abstinence educators. Relatively minor, perhaps, but with a generous nose and hearty bouquet of parochialism, anti-scientific sentiment, nannyism, and general contempt for the only-slightly more cosmopolitan attitudes toward sex of the urban liberal set. Betrayals, betrayals. They won't end the war, they won't close Guantanamo, they won't revisit habeus corpus, they won't impeach. Now you might imagine, given the total failure of the Democratic Party-in-Office to do anything that its electoral constituency wants it to do, the foment of some revolt would bubble in the ranks, but that dream, alas, is just a dream.

Here, as is so often the case, the elementary error is to listen to what they say rather than looking at what they do. It's plain that our elder guardians in the Congrefs of these United States look askance on teenagers employing their genetalia to pleasurable effect. So they have decided to fund a national campaign of scolding. Will it work? Of course not. Is it intended to work? It is no more intended to work than screaming at the television is intended to make the coach travel backward in time and re-call that bonehead play. It could just as easily be accomplished by voting a sense of the Senate that "These damned kids today . . ." It is a general expression of antipathy to the loosening of sexual mores. It is an impotent cry against the supposed increase in adolescent blowjobbing.

My Dear Self-described Progressives: The Democrats don't care about you. The United States has a far-flung global garrison to maintain. They've got agitating to do abroad and humbuggery to do at home. These constant bouts of apoplexy on the part of Donkle cheerleaders are becoming tiresome. But I'm sure that after this next election, The Most Important Elections Ever In Our Lifetimes Ever™, a rational discussion can proceed on the subject of finding a true challenge to the unitary national security state. Can't it?

The Broken Wall, the Burning Roof and Tower

“It was a pretty simple world Madison was dealing with when he wrote the Federalist Papers,” said Morris P. Fiorina, professor of political science at Stanford University. “His focus was on land, labor and commerce. He was clearly aware of the need to defend the borders, but he was more concerned that you had to limit the reach of government and insure that transitory majorities can’t have their way.” (From The Times)

A pretty simple world.

The belief in a simple past is the Helen to our Troy.

Punch in the nose

Joe Lieberman is one bloodthirsty motherfucker, isn't he? I mean, wow. This line that Iranians can't come into Iraq and kill Americans, ergo bombs away, is so far beyond bromide that it's become like lithium. I read it and I feel all affect slipping away. No wonder Americans are such rubes. They've been mood-leveled by a series of pharmaceutically stabilizing assurances. It seems to me that if Americans can go into Iraq and kill Iraqis, then Iranians can go into Iraq and kill Americans, and on and on along the trail of gun powder to the keg. Although I understand that part of the American catechism is the article that our actions shall in no cases justify reciprocal action, and I understand that it is star-far from the mainstream to suggest otherwise, but I can't believe that it doesn't occur to Jo Lieberman that other peoples will at least claim this justification. And since I can't believe that people like Joe Lieberman are unaware of such inevitable outcome, it seems to me that the constant advocacy for policies that would promote exactly those outcomes, then I'm left knowing what I knew all along but tried to reason away: that a substantial portion of the United States government is still trying to goad Iran into a war.