Sit Down You're Rockin the Boat

I suppose it won't come as news to anyone that much-beloved storybook character Jesus "Kinch" Christ was totally bonkers, a charismatic cultist who obliged his equally nutty followers to give up all their earthly possessions, abandon their families and homes, and join him on the mothership trailing in the icy tail on the lee side of the Hale-Bopp comet. He Himself couldn't quite make up his mind what he stood for. He spent half his time helping whores and the homeless find their Body Thetans, tying daisy chains for his hair, and singing Peter Paul & Mary numbers, and the other half haranguing his groupies for the insufficient commitment to divisiveness and spiritual violence:

Whosoever therefore shall confess me before men, him will I confess also before my Father which is in heaven. But whosoever shall deny me before men, him will I also deny before my Father which is in heaven. Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law. And a man's foes shall be they of his own household. [Matthew: 32-36]

Yo that shit's crazy yo! So then I read Jim Wallis, a latter-day, leftische huckster of the Good News, following up on a spat with notorious root vegetable Glenn Beck, opining that

Jesus said that we should love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. So whatever Beck does, Christians who want to follow Jesus should not personally attack Beck but, rather, should pray for him, for the poor and for our country, which is being harmed by an increasingly poisonous public discourse.

Well, it's true that Jesus said that, sort of, but he also said that he would, you know, deny those fuckers their place in heaven, that not only would he fail to intercede on their behalf with Sky Dad, but that he would, literally Joe Biden, cast them into an eternal torture chamber where they'd be consumed "body and soul." Speaking of poisonous discourse. So all that turn-the-other-cheek shit, that was basically Diamond J telling his boiieeeze not to pop a nigga and bring the heat but don't worry son I got your back you know what I'm sayin? Can't just be a brawler gotta be smart, son. Aight?

I mean, pray for Glenn Beck? Pray for him to what? To die? To molt that obviously painful exoskeleton and free his constricted thorax? To finally lose his virginity? What the fuck is praying going to do? Shit, Wallis, you better pray that Fox cancels his goddamn contract, because that's the only thing that's going to shut him up. Oh, what, wait, you thought his shit is for real? Brother, you Christians will believe anything.

Inconceivable!

So, actually, I think that Bill Kristol, despite coming off as even more of a despicable, trough-dwelling, cum-guzzling pisspig than usual, which is, you know, quite a feat, because Bill Kristol is the Black Iberico of coprophile, peg-fetishist, emasculation-fantasy toe-jam lickers, has got a point. To say that something is "unacceptable," in the language of our politics, is to accede to its inevitability while ostensibly saying otherwise. That is why I have journeyed in my own personal time machine to January 10, 2007, when President John Fitzcarraldo Kerry famously said:

The situation in Iraq is unacceptable to the American people -- and it is unacceptable to me.

Foodie Friday, Fruits de mer edition

When was the last time we did seafood? How about

Prawn bisque with littleneck clams, and mussels

1 ½ lbs prawns (or shrimp) heads on
2 dozen littleneck clams
3 dozen blue mussels
2 medium shallots, finely diced
1 carrot, finely diced
2-3” lemongrass, chopped
1 cup dry white wine
2 cups heavy cream
clarified butter
sea salt
white pepper

Really a simple dish that seems terribly sophisticated and restaurant-y when you serve it, this is a favorite of mine for a dinner party, best accompanied by a bone-dry Gaillac or Provençal white, a tart salad, and a rustic bread.

Shell the prawns from “throat” to tail after cutting off the legs with scissors. Remove the heads whole. Reserve the heads and shells. Vein the prawns with a small, sharp knife. Discard the guts. Set the flesh aside.

In a wok or deep dish, melt several table-spoons of clarified butter over very high flame. Add the shallots, carrot, and lemongrass, salting lightly. Sauté until the onions begin to soften. Add the reserved shells, legs, and heads, again salting lightly. Toss continually until the shells have turned bright red—several minutes. Add 1 cup wine and 4-5 quarts water. Bring to a rapid boil and then reduce heat. Simmer for 20-25 minutes.

Strain through a fine, double-layer sieve. Return the strained stock to the stove top. Slowly wish in the cream. Salt to taste. Now add the clams. As they just begin to open, add the prawn meat and the mussels. Serve immediately in deep bowls when the shellfish have opened, garnished with freshly ground white pepper.

Yinztopia

Looooooook. Europeans pay more taxes. They also go to jail less and kill fewer brown people. There are, like, tradeoffs, yo. Plainly anarchy and European social democracy are at odds, and yet, for the gazillionth time, the Euros have managed fifty-ish years of relative peace and prosperity and are, on the whole, healthier and happier than Americans. Okay, Charles Krauthammer, you're sort of correct to say that ballooning public debt will eventually demand higher taxation in order to maintain services. 'Cause, seriously, we could be living in a hellhole like this:

Journal of Political Naïveté

Who’s going to support Barry O. in 2012, asks Ian Welsh:

At this point Obama has

1) not stopped the Bush era raids against Hispanics which is totally at his discretion;
2) not lived up to his promises to gays, and he can stop DADT any time he bloody well wants to;
3) not been willing to protect women’s abortion rights
4) not shown any intention of passing EFCA (a bill helping unions organize)

Unions, women, latinos, gays…

Who does he bloody well think is going to support him in 2012?

Well. I think he thinks that Unions, women, latinos, and gays are going to support him. These are constituencies that pretty reliably sell themselves down the river in pursuit of a more lenient master. I think that blacks are going to vote for him. I think that all the same little proggles who wept rainbow sunshine happy tears at the passage of a health care bill that is basically the opposite of everything they hoped and argued for because Something is always better than Nothing when Something Must Be Done are going to vote for him. Meanwhile, American unions sold out decades ago. When was the last time labor did shit other than fight rearguard actions for anachronistic working conditions and failing fixed benefits packages while management gleefully rode their collectivized ass like a blowed-up Rush Limbaugh on a Dominican whore, taking a mandated smoke break every two years to pull the lever for whatever Donk hack leadership endorsed at the photo op? And every soi-disant progressive blurgher, aforementioned Re: healthcare, from La Digs on down, will diddle themselves and their readers, i.e. White Democrats, into a state of panicked, preorgasmic hot-flashery by painting a cinematic apocalypse of America if the GOP Palin-Rasputin-Zombie Milt Friedman triumvirate ticket wins in November. Obama may be a genuine American idiot, but he's no dummy, and he knows this to be true. Maybe if you watch cable news and read the papers with a less jaundiced eye than mine, you worry that disillusionment and low turnout will make him a one-term president. Maybe if you take politics seriously, you poor things, you fret about Republican party discipline and Donk disarray. Me, I look at the sweaty red face of the tea-party crowds and the spaghettic-western-injun tan of John Boehner cracking with heartfelt regret at the death of America and read only: Losers. You think the Money wants those people running shit?

Oz

Look. The point is not really that more priests rape or that priests rape more often, but that there is an entire institutional culture dedicated to fomenting, suborning, obfuscating, and encouraging rape. That, you know, is really the issue. I mean, when it turns out that some fifteen-year-old knocked up his art teacher, we all recoil in lurid horror, and the poor hussy gets dragged through mud and tar and then thrown in the clink, but when a priest rapes 200 deaf kids, the church is all like, "Whoops, sorry, uh, yeah. Uh, his immediate supervisor definitely will address this issue at his upcoming annual review. A note may be placed in his personnel file. Did you guys call HR? Cause, uh, this isn't really our department." No institution this side of the American penal system seems to me to have so cavalier an attitude toward nonconsensual sex. And that's saying something.

Freidonia

Friedman's basic premise, widely shared I'm afraid, is weirdly tautological and self-begging--society exists in order to create government, whose purpose, "governance" is to create the type of society that will endow itself with good government. The most fundamental block of a Thomas Friedman column is a statement to the effect that we need a government that will make it possible for X to Y. Look at today's column. Its central premise is that American society needs to have a better government in order that the government can better American society. It's like a fucking Escher drawing, without the comforting rot and bad reggae of a dorm room to mellow the harsh.

Now We Know How Many Holes It Takes to Fill the Albert Hall

This reform bill has many holes in it, as you know. And when that becomes obvious, it's going to be necessary to have the public plan sponsored and ready, the idea fully developed and the political support in place to quickly pass this when the opportunity strikes.

-La Digs

As the kvetching progressivisti came predictably into line, lending their unconvincingly grudging support to "health care reform," a new . . . how would a progressive put it? . . . a new narrative coalesced, in which the current vast boondoggle is really no more than a ribbon-cutting ceremony, a symbolic first shovelful of earth at the groundbreaking. Oh, when pressed, they will defend its supposed real merits with their by-now selfsame platitudes: "30 million uninsured . . . pre-existing conditions . . . tra la la." But within their own whisper galleries, they flop like fish who disbelieve the hook because they still taste the bait. There is no public plan, you fools, you morons. This is it!

I won't spend a lot of time reiterating old arguments, but it does bear repeating that the US House of Representatives just based a bill universally mandating that individuals purchase a private commodity--a commodity, let's be clear, that the same bill goes to great lengths to keep private. A so-called "public plan" is exactly the opposite of what this bill is, and the idea that public insurance will somehow flow naturally from its own nemesis is either crazy, a lie, or a crazy lie.

Look, Matty, Have You Ever Heard of Vietnam?

Now that [Health Care is] done, Barack Obama will go down in history as one of America’s finest presidents. It’s always possible of course that, like LBJ, he’ll get involved in some unrelated fiasco that mars his reputation.

-Yglesias giving some tongue action

I am going to enjoy this. Jesus Christ, Yggie must keep his brain in some kind of Schrödinger's Box to be this goddamn unselfaware.