End Game

Another, farther-flung correspondent who goes by the code-name Black George textseses us last night

U may not agree with the tough decisions, but i hope u'll agree that i was willing to make the tough decisions.

It truly is the Samuel Beckett Presidency. I was all highed up at the time and didn't quite get it. Actual text:

You may not agree with some of the tough decisions I have made. But I hope you can agree that I was willing to make the tough decisions.

It really is an extraordinary notion, isn't it? That the act of deciding exists independently of the decision itself, that the outcome is an invalid rubric for judging the appropriateness and rightness of the initiatory act.

Foodie Friday, Risotto

Risotto is ubiquitous in restaurants these days, and popular with cooks at home as well, but too often the rice is overpowered by heaps of, say, folded-in wild mushrooms, or other intense and over-added flavors. (I like wild mushroom risotto, don't get me wrong, but powerful flavors in excess ruin the dish.) In a good risotto, you can taste the grain. It's about texture, aroma, and the subtle blending of flavors. This is one of my favorites, made with a duck organ stock, flavored with fennel, citrus, and a hint of chili.

Fennel risotto, duck-flavored

for the stock

reserved giblets, innards, neck, neck skin, wing joints, and blood from a whole roasting duck
1 large yellow onion, quartered
1 carrot, unpeeled, cut in large chunks
1 celery stalk, cut in large chunks
1 clove
sea salt
filtered water

for the risotto

1 medium yellow onion, finely diced
2-3 medium shallots, finely diced
3 cloves garlic, finely diced
1 medium fennel bulb, diced
1 1/2 cups good arborio rice
1 medium dried chili, rough chopped
1 cup dry white wine
1 lemon to squeeze
duck stock (from above)
sea salt
black peppercorn, freshly ground
1 cup grated Pecorino Romano

For the stock, combine all of the ingredients in a stock pot (except the salt--salt to taste as you go). Bring to a boil over a medium high heat. As it boils, a grayish foamy scum will rise to the top. Skim off, and repeat as necessary. Reduce to a quick simmer. Cover and simmer for 2 hours. Strain through a fine sieve. Return to heat. Simmer for another 20 minutes. Strain a second time through cheese-cloth (or alternately, you can use a pre-dampened heavy-duty paper towel, but they can be delicate). Reserve, keeping warm over your lowest heat.

For the risotto, heat the olive oil over a medium heat. Add the onion, shallot, and garlic when hot, but not popping. Salt. The goal is to sweat them out, not to caramelize them. As they begin to soften, add the fennel and salt lightly again. Sweat them out--you should see their juice mixing in the bottom of the pot. Add the chopped chili.

When the fennel has started softening, add the rice. Cook directly in the oil. Then deglaze with the white wine and juice of half the lemon. Reduce the heat to medium or medium-low (depending on the strength and heat of your burners), and begin adding the stock. You should stir regularly, but it's not necessary to stir constantly. When cooking risotto, it's less important that you stir every second than it is that you maintain the right liquid level. The rice should always be just below the level of the liquid, up to the very end of cooking. Continue stirring and adding liquid until the rice reaches it's proper done-ness. A spoonful should have a creamy, almost glutenous quality, but you should be able to feel the individual grains in your mouth, and when you chew, you should feel the slight resistance of the nutty core of each grain. I typically start tasting after fifteen minutes of cooking and continue to taste ever minute after that.

When the rice has reached this point, fold in the cheese, add black pepper to taste. Remember, you should still see a little liquid. Cover and turn off the heat. Let stand for five minutes. Uncover, mix thoroughly (the liquid will now have all been absorbed), and serve. I often garnish with chopped fennel fronds.

Pig Play

(Cut back to the motel room. Mulder is still reading.)

MULDER: "...thee. Before I knew it, I was aboard the hover vessel and was not heading into outer space, but inner space, heading towards the earth's molten core. For that is the domain of the third alien, whose name, he soon told me... was Lord Kinbote."

(Mulder looks up at Scully. Cut to the X-Files office.)

SCULLY: In short, Rocky showed signs of being what is known as a fantasy-prone personality.

JOSE CHUNG: Agent Scully, you are so kindhearted. He's a nut! I just read his manifesto!

SCULLY: How did you get a copy?

(He pulls out the manifesto.)

JOSE CHUNG: One was sent to my publishers. I don't know what was more disturbing... his description of the inner core reincarnated souls sex orgy... or the fact that the whole thing is written in screenplay format.

SCULLY: It definitely was peculiar.

-"José Chung's from Outer Space," The X-Files

Oh noes!

One of our far-flung correspondents recently put us on the . . . scent of one Donald Douglas:

I am a pro-victory Associate Professor of Political Science teaching in Southern California. I love my country, and I fully support current U.S. military operations around the world. I despise the hard-left radical agenda and discourse. I also abhor irrationalism in argumentation. I welcome comments and debate, and I'll defend my positions vigorously. Yet in friendship, you'll find no one more dignified, trustworthy, nor loyal.

Now Don has discovered that the hard-left is planning to get even harder in a Bacchanalian celebration of the Triumph of Faggotry over Decency and the crowning of Barack Obama as the King of Catamites.

It would be easy to read a certain Freudian latency in this clinically morbid fascination with gay sex. But we here at Who Is IOZ? are made of more analytical stuff. Although it's true that the Grand Ol' Party and its affiliates are home to more than their share of Mark Foleys, the issue is less one of repressed sexual "identity" per se than it is of a blander, but broader repression of individual sexuality in general. I hardly think it necessary to put on leather, hop onto the sling, and get fisted all night in order to achieve real sexual satisfaction. Lord knows, that's a forearm too far for me, being generally, if moderately, more vanilla in my tastes. That said, a degree of disinhibition is necessary for a decent roll in the hay; to get to anything other than the most mechanical of ejaculatory orgasms, you've got to be willing to lose yourself a little in the moment.

My guess is that Don can't dance either, another pasttime predicated on some personal abandon. What these folks find most disturbing about self-actualized queers is the absence of a veil of shame. How can it be just that these deviants act without it while I, an ordinary guy, feel it so intensely?

Moral Authority

You know, it's remarkable how many people are all like, we must categorically repudiate torture, for if we do not, then what is our moral standing in the world? And yet you by and large do not hear the same folks say that we must categorically repudiate, you know, invading other countries, toppling their governments, and forcibly occupying their territory--you know, humanitarily or whatever--at the cost of thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of lives. Because, after all, uh . . .

Requiescat in Pace

UPDATE:

Annals of History Repeating

There is a very interesting piece in yesterday's Times in which Jeffrey Goldberg explains that the only hope for peace between the Israelis and Palestinians is for Israel and moderate governments in the region to support the Islamic Resistance Movement as a counterweight to the hardline Popular Front . . . or, wait. What?

Murder and Mystery

In today's Times Rog Cohen explains that he hopes Obama will be guided by a mystically prophetic pig. He wants "magical realism." God, how I hate that phony genre label. So did Borges, and Rushdie, whom Cohen quotes, is no fan either. Rog seems to believe that the "magic" has something to do with optimism, or hope, or alternately, lying about current economic outlooks.

One thing seems certain: The meltdown is going to hang over at least the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The Treasury is bare. Americans are deluged in debt. Confidence has been Madoffed.

That’s the realism. But this 47-year-old man of mixed race, whose very name — O-Ba-Ma — has the three-syllable universality of a child’s lullaby, has always had something of the providential about him, a global figure who looks more like the guy at the local bodega than the guys on dollar bills. That’s the magic.

"The three-syllable universality of a child's lullaby"? Where does Bill Keller find these guys?

Do the Right Thing

Today Pennsylvania's senior Senator will depart his coffin full of native Appalachian soil and descend upon the chambers of the Senate to demand that Eric Holder prove his independence. I will give it to the Conservative faction: they've mastered the art of shamelessness far beyond the palace rivals. Because we all know how rhetorically committed Republicans have been to preventing undue obeisance to the Executive. Um. So, yeah.

Meanwhile, I hope no one, Hillary included, has ever had to contemplate a "backdoor way to go after Bill Clinton." Clearly, in any case, Holder's best possible response to questions about the Marc Rich pardon will be to reference the new anti-Semitism. That shit never fails.

Steel City

So I knew about the Steagles and Card-Pitt, and I knew that Greasy Neale and Walt Kiesling famously despised each other, but I never knew that their co-coaching arrangement led to the creation of the offensive and defensive coordinator positions. Neat article, especially since at least one of the descendants is going to play in the Super Bowl.

Pearls and Swine

Future Cialis spokesmodel Richard Perle took to the pages of The National Interest to assure us that it was most certainly not his fault. What wasn't his fault, you ask? It, that's what wasn't, none of it. Typically when a rat leaves a sinking ship, it attempts to make the escape while the fucker's still partly above water at least, but to each rodent his own pace, I suppose. The intellectual acumen on display is proof--if you needed any more of it--that the Lord Baby Jesus loves mediocrities most among us: he fucks the poor and helpless, he makes geniuses mad, poor, or syphilitic, but Richard Perle has the ear of presidents and potentates, plus a cushy gig writing exculpatory fantasies in various subsidized publications.

It's all done in a tone of mock reasonableness mixed with aggrieved resignation, suggesting a man who's come home from a tough day at work to tell the wifea honey-you-won't-believe story, even as he forgets to tell her that in fact he was fired. Skim it and see what I mean. Of all its revisionisms, one strikes me as the most compellingly retarded:

OUR PRE-9/11 concept of security assumed that terrorists wished to survive their attacks.

Richard Perle, meet October 23, 1983.

Ordo Tempi Poorientalis

Via the Stiftung (wherein one finds the usual solid take) I see that Bohemian Grove regular and all-around Reptilian Sky God Henry Kissinger is calling for a New World Order. This is pure gold for conspiracy theorists, the equivalent of Chris Hitchens finding a pope-penned article calling for a new NAMBLA charter.

More substantively, after muddling around in the financial crisis (institutions globalized . . . response piecemeal . . . economic world . . . global reach), it seems to me that the nut to crack is this:

This generation of leaders has the opportunity to shape trans-Pacific relations into a design for a common destiny, much as was done with trans-Atlantic relations in the immediate postwar period - except that the challenges now are more political and economic than military.

This dude is supposed to be some kind of towering intellectual, and yet he doesn't appear to appreciate that the "common destiny" shaped after the Second World War was mostly to do with the Red Army. You had a gaggle of war-ravaged Western European countries and big scary Uncle Joe Stalin gobbling up the Eastern Bloc and the United States essentially unscathed and in possession of, more or less, the entire industrial output of the world, all the extant major manufacturing left on this good earth.

Today, on the other hand, you have no commensurate circumstance. China has the manufacturing base and America has, what? Substandard satellite-exurb home construction, a lot of highways, and a military fighting rearguard actions in failed-state colonial provinces while claiming that the chaos around them represents progress toward democratic pluralism. Yeah, there's a model the Party wants to embrace. Insofar as it can, China has an interest in keeping on staking our bets, because we serve one singular purpose for them, and that is to consume their junk. Insofar as we have a "common destiny" it's that one of these days centrifugal forces are going to blast apart unwieldy megastates like China and the US. But probably not today, tomorrow, or anytime within Kissinger's mercifully diminishing lifespan.

As the good book says, There's no ransom if you don't have a fucking hostage. That's what ransom is. Those are the fucking rules. The trans-Atlantic alliance started out as an inverse protection scheme: give us your forward bases, and we'll give you some walking-around money and keep the Soviets off the lawn. So far, the only thing we've offered China in the way of security is allowing our global counterjihad to rile up the good subjects in Xinjiang while Pakistan and India growl at each other to the southwest. Kissinger brought the chessboard, but left the chessmen at home.

"The alternative to a new international order," Henry says, "is chaos." Lord knows, we can't have any of that.

Annals of Overcompensation

Not only is Gene Robinson a queer, he's also an alkie! Take that, fagz! Obama lurves yer shit.

Bye Bye Birdie

There was a time in America when the footsteps of theologians shook the land. Following World War II, people cared what Reinhold Niebuhr, Bishop Fulton Sheen and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel had to say on public matters. These large figures provided the intellectual and moral ballast for a rough national crossing through the Cold War and the civil rights movement.

Today, this cultural role seems to be filled by some mix of Oprah Winfrey and Deepak Chopra -- which is to say, it is not filled at all.

It's like, in a world with no Ed Sullivan . . .

Integars

I have only one question about Israel’s military operation in Gaza: What is the goal? Is it the education of Hamas or the eradication of Hamas? I hope that it’s the education of Hamas. Let me explain why.

-Lil' Tommy Friedman

There may be no clearer distillation of the Friedman method than this. Announce that you "have only one question," and then immediately follow that declaration with two. Good god, man, throw in a "by which I mean," for the love of all that's decent.

Friedman goes on to crow that he "was one of the few people who argued back in 2006 that Israel actually won the war in Lebanon started by Hezbollah." This is like touting one's belief, circa 2006, that housing prices would rise twenty percent per annum forever, or claiming to have been one of the people who argued in 1617 that Simplicio made the better argument in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems. Friedman's rationale?

Israel’s military was not focused on the morning after the war in Lebanon — when Hezbollah declared victory and the Israeli press declared defeat. It was focused on the morning after the morning after, when all the real business happens in the Middle East. That’s when Lebanese civilians, in anguish, said to Hezbollah: “What were you thinking? Look what destruction you have visited on your own community! For what? For whom?”

Back here on Planet Earth, meanwhile, Hezbollah (along with its coalition partners in the Resistance and Development bloc) has veto power in the Lebanese Parliament and holds eleven of thirty cabinet posts. I wouldn't mind that sort of defeat myself.

In a larger sense--and Friedman is hardly alone in this kind of thinking; he's only the most glaringly moronic exemplar of it--what you see here is the popular, failed strategy of arguing against terrorism and guerrilla resistance on the basis of its efficacy, to pretend, as above for instance, that the mythical "people" will look at the destruction around them and kick out the goons who were "responsible," to pretend that it de-legitimates itself. But the position of Hezbollah wasn't weakened in the '06 war; it was strengthened. People may have disapproved of kidnapping a couple of Israeli soldiers in a dumb effort to game a prisoner exchange, but they blame Israel for killing a thousand Lebanese civilians.

Bombing Gaza, killing a hundred Palestinians for every one Israeli, doesn't affect the popular currency of Hamas. If Israel kills all but one militant in Gaza, Hamas comes out the moral victor. The wet-eyed pro-Israel faction in America may not like it, but there it is. I don't make the news, I just read it, brother.

Israel de facto recognizes Hamas’s right to rule Gaza and to provide for the well-being and security of the people of Gaza — which was actually Hamas’s original campaign message, not rocketing Israel. And, in return, Hamas has to signal a willingness to assume responsibility for a lasting cease-fire and to abandon efforts to change the strategic equation with Israel by deploying longer and longer range rockets.

If Israel "de facto recognize[d] Hamas's [sic] right to rule," then it wouldn't have closed the borders and laid siege. I have just one question for Tom Friedman. Why should Hamas "signal a willingness to assume responsibility for a lasting cease-fire"? By which I mean, what does it benefit Hamas, or Gaza in general? Not with a viable state. Not with a workable economy. Not with open borders, or the right to issue passports, or the ability to travel unrestricted to the West Bank, or compensation for long-since-expropriated property. Hamas can exchange restraint for a calmer imprisonment. Unsurprisingly, they are not moved by the offer.

Calling Nancy Grace

Hey, look, it turns out that the internet doesn't want to rape your children after all! What is it with Americans and pedophilia?

Department of Overlapping Sets

Marvel as these teenage girls shamelessly exploit these teenage girls in the kiddie-porn case of the decade.