Never thought I’d say this, but maybe Panchito was not so abysmal on the restaurant beat. By comparison, he’s not waving but drowning in the new gig. As my consort said, you have to bail at the first sentence. And as someone Tweeted: “I wasted one NYT click on this bullshit?” She linked, though, so maybe that’s the plan. People do like lookin’ at train wrecks. Code those Gucci ads even faster, ye who were left behind. . .
If any spouse thought long or hard about what he/she would have to put up with from the White House press corpse, only singles would ever get elected. Certainly the questions posed to Mrs. O by the creme de la overpaid creme at a “Let’s Move” lunch were cringe-inducers. What does $Palin think? Or, stupider, how dare you serve Super Bowl food on Super Bowl Sunday? No one ever asked the Lump in the Bed why the Chimp kept turning up bruised and battered while she blathered between cigs about reading. Some days I suspect what goes on in the Imperial Bedroom is not terrorist fist-bumping but good old American face-palming.
Turns out the soulless Chimp looks to have plagiarized much of his shameless book, but I suspect what @rudepundit is calling the “Ball jar Bush baby” tale is original. It’s just weird enough that the literal son of a bitch would have been warped by a canned fetus. What I want to know is how Panchito missed such a juicy tidbit. Scratch that. I already know. He was sucking and blowing. Or vice versa.
I’m glad to see a chef calling whatever the German is for bullshit on the Lump in the Chimp’s Bed. It would take a killer to know one, but her tale of his food poisoning a whole delegation reeks. If it had been even remotely possible, wouldn’t Go Fuck Yourself have rounded up half of Heiligendamm and tortured everyone into confessing? And how dumb does she think readers are, not to realize it was the Tanqueray talking?
Given how bamboozled the media was about the Iraq war, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that reporters were so flummoxed by the Big O’s medical checkup. Suffice it to say: Pie does not equal elevated cholesterol. Burgers, neither. It could just as well be all the stress of trying to steer the Titanic as the icebergs melt, but the stenographers just heard and typed. Without noting that a doctor never once advised the Chimp to “continue to use alcohol in moderation.” Bottoms up, indeed.
I know we’re all supposed to pretend 2001 to 2009 never happened, but I had one thought on hearing — and hearing, and hearing, and hearing — the big White House party was crashed: The Secret Service must have been worn out by all those years of chasing the Skank Twins on their margarita binges. Not to mention hiding the pretzels from the Chimp. The return of honor and dignity and a wine-drinker in chief must be freaking everyone out. But I really blame “Iron Chef.” Once the freckled calves got in, the barbarians were through the gates.
Then again, I needed my faith restored after an absurd story on Obama’s taste for the grape, and beer, and, whoa!, tequila. Amazing how the same media that sat by quietly for eight years while a dry drunk sucked on O’Doul’s nonstop can churn out crap about a normal guy’s normal drinking. Imagine what a field day they would have if he “choked on a pretzel.”
I see “The Accidental Critic” is heading toward bookstores like swine flu in airplanes. My only curiosity is whether Panchito will devote at least a chapter to all the horseshit he swallowed and dutifully regurgitated in service to the Chimp. Considering the carnage that ensued, fucking Elvis looks like a noble deed.
A real live reader asked me recently if it isn’t harder to keep carping without the Chimp. But really, how can we miss him when he will not go away? Another reader down in his new hometown sent me a sighting of the simian war criminal in a restaurant where he allegedly was greeted with a standing ovation. So the village has its idiot back. Pretzels all around!
The good news just keeps coming these days. One day I’m informed that baby broccoli (a k a sprouts) will ward off stomach cancer, the next it’s licorice kicking bowel cancer’s ass. Ever since the Franklin Mint famously went to the Pom land, the first question I have is: Who sponsored this miraculous discovery? And of course I sat right up in suspense the other morning, wondering when the writer of a damning op-ed on “free-range” pigs would disclose who exactly underwrote the study finding animals raised in filth on antibiotics are safer. I jokingly Tweeted and soon had an answer. Yep, it was your friendly National Pork Board. Those guys want you to eat pork like chicken; they certainly will not get fat and happier by promoting meat from small farms where pigs get to live as pigs should, the now-unnatural way. I can’t fault the catapulter of the propaganda. But I do wonder where the backstop was on the editorial side. As the Journal has demonstrated, you lie down with Turdblossom and you wake up with no credibility. If I were the cynical sort, I’d propose a piece on how endangered snapper is the answer to pirates in the Indian Ocean. Hungry Somalian researchers say it’s so.
And that, of course, was the other big-laugh bonus of newspapers today. The Pollan Wannabe let his carnival mask drop and smart readers suddenly noticed he’s just talking the talk for maximum gain. And I would be bonding with all the alert readers who wondered where his editors were if I had not slogged through the Drivelist in gap-jawed fascination yet again. While she was dragging mollusks all over the kitchen in search of a nut graf, who could possibly look away long enough to wonder what the Google says? No worries, though. A Colbert shout-out is worth lost credibility any day. Just ask a certain new Dallas resident.
It was nice to see the Chimp actually did manage a legacy, although it’s not so nice (or so surprising) that people have died as a result. The evisceration of the FDA, to the point that inspectors have been begging the Big O to save them, pretty much guaranteed that salmonella would infect America through the unlikeliest but most ubiquitous edible. Somewhere the last GW — Carver — must be in anaphylactic shock.
With the whole country awash in more hope than the floodwaters over New Orleans, I should be moving on from the derangement the Chimp has induced. But the seven-eighths of me that is my cynical half still cannot believe he will actually leave the scene of his eight years of crime. Going on the teevee to lie that he kept the country safe was like a chef ignoring the sell-by date on his chickens, killing 3,000 diners in one day and then boasting that no one had died at his tables since then. I’m not the religious type, but I can’t help wondering if the salmonella in the peanut butter is not a sign from the sandwich-eater’s imaginary friend. Please, let it turn up next in the “non-beer.” In the bars in hell.
Looks as if the Chimp is determined to be a petty prick to the bitterest end. Not only did he lock the O family out of the Blair House kitchens, but he had his partner in crimes against taste order up the new china for the big house. So he will have a legacy; it just happens to be the most butt-ugly plates ever designed. And to think all the Lump in the Bed would have had to do to save taxpayers half a million bucks was Google “monkey dinnerware.”
In poking around whitehouse.gov just now and finding tomatoes in November, it was sort of funny to see the chardonnay served at the Berlusconi dinner: Ponzi. What did the Chimp’s sommelier know about Madoff, and when did he know it?
The chef who was lucky to have been canned rather than mowed down by Mrs. Chimp deserves a second medal on his whites, for lashing out twice at all the wannabe food advisers to the Big O for their “presumptions” about how the White House kitchen is stocked. I had wondered how a huge story could be printed with no effort made to actually, you know, ask about what goes on there now. Obviously, you don’t get organics without manure.