Someone needs to alert Panchito: No one wants his “lessons.” We’re still trying to unlearn the last one. The inestimable Charlie Pierce deserves a Pulitzer for this observation alone: Sportswriters have been accused of selling out for a steak dinner, but “you can buy the Washington press corps with a cheap nickname.”
I’m assuming the Chimp’s new library will have a Panchito Canteen. Where you can have a beer (and a pretzel) and finally understand that he sold America on a dry drunk.
And I really wish we were living in the future and none of this had happened yet. So now the Boston suspect has been charged with having a “weapon of mass destruction” and I guess everyone had just better prepare to surrender their pressure cookers. I grew up with one of those scary things — my mom used it every day to cook dried beans or, when the freezer was otherwise empty of venison, boil a deer heart into submission, and all seven of us kids would cower as it rocked back and forth on a burner, looking ready to detonate. I wasn’t surprised one could be converted by an evildoer, but I remain amazed at how many “reporters” seemed unaware it is not “like what you might use to cook rice,” as NPR’s terrorism expert helpfully explained. (Yeah, you might, but you might be thinking rice cooker.) At first I was going to make a joke about how airlines will one day no longer allow Prestos in carry-on bags, but then a Twitpal informed me Williams-Sonoma has already pulled those potential IEDs off its shelves. The crazy gets crazier and crazier. While I keep wondering why those founding fathers never thought to write in any rights for those of us who would just like to fly home with a bottle of wine or olive oil without having to check a bag. Didn’t Jefferson produce both?
My Panchito tracker again alerted me he had horked up another hacktastic word salad, but I again made it only a graf in before clicking that tab straight off. The real amusement came over to the Twitter, where his BFF was lauding his singular wisdom as if her gig depended on it. And, even better, where a big name who actually can eat and write DM’d me to observe that “his lack of wit almost rises to the level of a medical condition.” Well, he did once sell a joke: the Chimp. Too bad it was a terrible one.
How do you say “towel snapped across the ass” in Italian? It was rather rich to see Panchito dissing Italy’s very own Chimp. Oh, Texas. Such a rich trove of food. Such a spawning ground of Cruzes . . .
Wonder why a guy whose byline once appeared under “I Was a Baby Bulimic” was allowed to lecture everyone else about overdoing it. Especially right after he praised Ed Koch for “always overloading.” Bingeing is nothing new. Just ask the president he sold, the one who spent like a drunken bankster.
On this Kenyan muslin socialist morning in America, I have to point out that in a sane world Panchito would never have been deemed fit to print again after selling America on the Bushwhacker 2000. Given that his employers seem to be strapped for lunch money, though, maybe now’s the time to save a few hundred thou a year and cut his vapidity loose. He’d be fine living off all those vicarious dieters willing to be bored round.
I’m fascinated by how the same reporters who sat by silently while the Lump in the Bed squandered eight years “smoking and reading” now insist Mrs. O must do more than address childhood obesity. Cuz, you know, fud is women’s work.
Just back from Philadelphia, I know a couple more words for smashed (squiffy and zozzled) and a great euphemism for hooch (jag juice). But mostly, thanks to the totally vaut-le-voyage Prohibition exhibition, I have the perfect epithet for so many wingnuts, and more than a few “celebrity” chefs. And that would be the one applied to anti-booze William Jennings Bryan: “idol of all morondom.”
Once you’ve been cheerleader in chief for the Chimp, I guess you never have to worry about selling your soul — the deed is done. Which must be why Panchito is now advocating sacrifice in a Bushwhacked economy. I guess he doesn’t see the irony in suggesting the little people get by on fewer food stamps when he can simply purge if he binges on foie gras.
You have to Google to learn this stuff, but the Chimp has been so thoroughly disappeared he was not even seen at the W2 fund-raising lunch given in his own mansion by the Lump in the Bed. How long till his smirking visage turns up on milk cartons left to sour?
Once again, I have to thank my Panchito tracker for tipping me off to the latest embarrassment, which involved damning workers near the bottom of the food chain for getting duped in a movie and maybe in real life. As MPT noted, it’s a pot/kettle black mark on his already abysmal record as a non-S&B columnist. Did he somehow forget who let the hot dog out?
Which is by way of saying I’m just back from Washington and reeling, yet again, at how radically it’s changed just since 2001, let alone since my first trip there in like 1974 or ’75. Judging only by the restaurant scene, it’s Vegas on the Potomac, and I will not soon get over how bizarre it was to see throngs of young people on the streets at near midnight on Friday in a town that always left the ghosts to prowl after 9 o’clock for as long as I’ve known it (or at least the part I’ve always known). At least this time there was acknowledgement that the city owes it all to the explosion of lobbying money under the reign of error from 2001 to ’09. Now, a pastry chef said, ethics rules are cutting into business; restaurants aren’t benefiting from senators treated to dinners costing hundreds of dollars. They have to adhere to a $15 lunch limit and the toothpick rule — only tidbits than can be eaten off the tip of them are allowed. Which hasn’t stopped a boom in back-room dining, of course. Apparently a whole lot of bought-off legislators will fit into a private party.
I wish I could honestly wonder where the kkkrazies were when the Chimp and his Lump in the Bed opened the People’s House for the rare dinner. But I already know (any view is rather dark with head up rectum). Which makes it all the more pathetic that they attacked Mrs. O for serving a festive menu on a festive occasion. Anyone who believes governors on one big night should eat like everyday schoolkids needs his keyboard taken away.
Panchito has some nerve coming out as a prohibitionist now, 12 long years after he enabled a dry drunk to take the wheel and turn the ship of state into the USS Titanic. Gullible stenographers are much more dangerous to health and welfare than mere booze.