Panchito is really the twit that keeps on giving. Lately I’ve been seeing him dissed as an idjit because he was a restaurant critic and so must be clueless about anything non-food. But of course “Columnist Boyardee” was dumb about food before he was dumb about politics again. Although he was clearly a better judge of tuna tartare than of presidential timber.
Nobody could top Andy Borowitz’s Tweet observing that G.F.Y. Cheney had gotten a new heart while the Chimp was still awaiting a brain transplant. And probably no one can figure out why Panchito confessed to the condition his condition is in. As my consort asked: “He has gout? Why would I care?” As always, though, the round one revealed more than he intended. No one who thinks “revolting in its bloat” is the best thing in fud should ever be a restaurant reviewer. Images of Nick Nolte assessing ’82 Bordeaux immediately come to mind.
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.
And Panchito of course had to go and make things worse with his dodging and weaving on a subject he really should stay the hell away from. (And I don’t mean politics.) The last thing people need at this point is silly scare stories on how you have to kill yourself to stay thin. Ask Mme “French Women Don’t Get Fat.” Hard as it is for him to imagine, and once was for me, it’s all about a healthy relationship with food. Which is possible if you tune out 99 percent of the merde you read/hear. But the funniest thing is imagining what tune the round one would be playing if the satanic drug dealer had been caught selling a line of food for companion animals that gave them diabetes. Somehow I suspect his editor the dog diarist would call out the pitchforks.
I’ll acknowledge being rather brutal toward the Lump in the Bed (as her husband christened her with less affection than he showed Panchito). But she did kill someone (who was it who said there are no accidents?) And she did sit by “smoking and reading” while her dry drunk drove the country into the ditch. But even she didn’t deserve the ugliness of the attacks on her successor, which all seem to have something to do with melanin. So I was glad to see Media Matters dig around to prove the ugliness has nothing to do with nutrition. Guess whose administration was pushing the very same “eat less & exercise” message. And of course it’s down the memory hole because, like everything the Texan Lady Macbeth was involved with, it was a fail. Processed crap gets crappier, kids get fatter. You can’t explain that.
Even I get weary of picking on Panchito, but he really should take that huge target off his posterior. Didn’t he help keep the Lump in the Bed’s fatal distraction off the national radar until the Chimp was duly installed? And at least he could be gracious enough to address the dissing her successor is taking from the KKKrazies. He is, after all, a guy with his own twisted relationship with pretzels.
And I almost felt sorry for Panchito when Gawker tore him a new bunghole over his latest thousand-word motivational poster. But as a real friend on Facebook noted, he must make enough not to earn pity. So I’ll just disagree with everyone who opines that he should go back to the fud beat. Because he was just as shallow and lacking in expertise and pedaling inanely there. Two years around the McD’s at the Spanish Steps does not an A.J. Liebling make.
If the hometown paper had a microgram of self-awareness it would put Panchito on hiatus till next November, or maybe just let him natter on about beer snacks and the harmless characters America might wanna eat them with. As it is, too many readers remember the sweaty bar towel the Chimp snapped across his ass. . .
Given that he wanted to bring his table cred to the column, though, I wonder if he noted that food commercials are held to a pretty high standard. You can’t use shaving cream for whipped cream, or mashed potatoes for ice cream, to avoid having your product melt under hot lights. You can’t claim your cereal is more nutritious than your rival’s unless it actually is. Which makes me think maybe pizza morphing into a vegetable is an unhealthier start than we realized. Food is this close to being declared a citizen.
And I’m happy to see everyone freaking the crust out over pizza being declared a vegetable, but if food had been treated more seriously by the media all these years maybe Americans would have understood how it happened. I’ve written before how the backwater on the Potomac suddenly became Restaurant Central under the Chimp’s reign of error (thank you, Panchito), but no one ever connected the dots — a consequence of segregating food coverage in the getting-and-spending sections. Stuffy old French places from the Reagan era were still good enough during the Clinton boom, but somehow money started flowing in the streets in the 21st century, especially around Penn Quarter. If you want to keep frozen Freedom Fries on school lunch menus, you have to buy yourself a few congressmen. Over drinks and dinner.
. . . “Into the Abyss” is one of the most retrospectively powerful movies I’ve seen. Werner Herzog definitely gets at Real America and its gated communities, so safe you could die for want of a clicker. The ending is beyond compelling, and even as I joke about my epitaph from the crematorium being “Twittered Away,” I am thinking more and more about The Dash. Mostly, though, I’m trying to get the crime scene with the vintage cookbook and the half-finished batch of cookies out of my head. Also, too, many furious thoughts about The Chimp and his enabler, Panchito. . .
I keep thinking doughnuts are an overlooked trend story, but then I’m so busy gobbling digital doughnuts I can’t even keep up with my own work. So I’ll just start by ReTweeting myself: This country needs an #OccupyPanchito. He gets paid megabucks to dribble drivel after selling the “ambler” who drove the country into the #OWS ditch. I’d suggest the foie gras treatment, but apparently that would not be painful. . .
I always joke about selling decoder rings, but for this you might want to order brain bleach: I slogged through Panchito’s sad dodge-and-weave alluding to his part in foisting a dry drunk onto the country as a harmless good ol’ boy. And all I could envision was Lady MacBeth shoving double bacon-cheeseburgers embunned in Krispy Kremes into her maw. Only guilt could explain it. And was he really saying take the Big Mac and leave the blow job?
Apparently Panchito would like to return us all to those wondrous days of yester2000 when a presidential candidate’s wife could have a dead body in her past and the story stayed safely buried. How’s that working out for the world? I can’t believe I’m saying this: Put him back on the eats beat. Burgers are totally bush league.
And now we come to the sorry end. Or, as I Tweeted it, the aspen falling in the dead-tree forest. I just wish Johnny Rotten were still in the baath and could weigh in on the lightweights taking the heavyweight jobs. My consort keeps saying stuff like “I don’t want to insult you, but food is just not serious news.” And he’s mostly right. JR was so wise in only dabbling in fud while swinging from the side of the heavyweights. Plus he was never empowered with opinions. Heading into a particularly contentious election, with the country on the skids, they picked a fine time to entrust a reviewer with oversight of unbiased news coverage. But if it gives the guy, and his readers, a break from a verbal form of what did in Elvis, I’m all for it.