And I saw another mighty angel come down from heaven, clothed with a cloud: and a rainbow was upon his head, and his face was as it were the sun

Joe Lieberman tells us that the Afghans are a "proud people with a proud history." Of throwing motherfuckers out of their country, hurrah! Then he outlines five surges, shoots his load, and starts snoring. All right already, Joe. You love war. We get it. You are become death, destroyer of worlds. You saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. You ride to Ragnarok. Smackdown! The Octagon! Hulk smash! Faster pussycat, kill, kill!

UPDATE: Link fixed.

Mandingo

Judith Warner has some kind of crazy-lady article about how all women want to be violated by Barack Obama's giant postracial member, apparently because Michelle Obama is the first campaign wife in history to smile lovingly at her husband while he makes speeches and praise him effusively in public.

Upon the divers Prophecies of Doome if the Bille currently considerred dos not Attaine Passage

Better made than bought or if bought, best
produced domestically by strong
and thick-necked workin men along
Steinbeckian lines, sun-tanned and tough and blessed
with super strength, or economic death
will creep like plague or sound an iron gong
while slobs collect their checks and hit the bong
and Wall Street burns and all of us regress
to trade and barter, currency in gold,
subsistence farming, handwashed clothes, and light
by lamp and candle, homes of sodden earth,
cave-dwelling anarchy defined by dearth
of higher ed and intenet, oh! slight
doom of a warehoused future world unsold!

Foodie Friday - Apple of the Earth Edition

In comments and in my inbox I've got a backlog of requests from subhuman vegetarians for meatless dishes, so here you go you perverts: three potato recipes.

Gratin pommes de terre au fromage Saint Nectaire

A favorite wintertime recipe, rich and hearty enough to serve as a main course. After experimenting with many different cheeses, including more traditional choices like Gruyère, Emmentaler, and pungent Raclette, I've found that Saint Nectaire, a semi-soft, woody, mushroom-y cow's milk cheese from Auvergne is the best complement--full of autumnal and wintry flavors, but mild enough to allow the taste of the potatoes to come fully through.

4-5 medium potatoes (I prefer Yukon gold), peeled and sliced to 1/8" (preferably with a mandoline)
1 medium yellow onion, peeled and sliced paper-thin
1 quart whole milk
1 clove garlic
freshly grated nutmeg
freshly-cracked black peppercorns
sea salt
1 clove garlic
butter
1/4 lb. Saint Nectaire

Preheat the oven to 375.

Combine the potatoes, onion, and milk with a generous grating of nutmeg, sea salt, and about a teaspoon of cracked peppercorns in a large sauce pan. Heat slowly over a medium heat, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking and scalding. You must carefully control the heat, or you will burn the milk. Cook until the potatoes are beginning to soften, but still firm to the touch.

Prepare a ceramic baking dish by rubbing its interior with the garlic clove, then rubbing generously with butter. Remove the rind from the cheese and cut into very thin slices (this operation is easier if the cheese is very cold, right out of the fridge, and still firm). Remove the half-cooked potatoes from the stove. Using a slotted spoon, transfer half into an even layer on the bottom of the pan. You'll want a some of the milk mixture to come along as well--it will be absorbed by the starchy roots. Spread evenly with half the cheese. Cover with a second layer of the rest of the potatoes. Again spread with the remaining cheese. Coat with a light dusting of nutmeg. Put in the oven and bake until bubbling and browning on top, 35-45 minutes.

Remove, let stand, covered, for 5-10 minutes. Cut into squares and serve.

Pan-fried potatoes

This is an easy way to make delicious fried potatoes without boiling first.

4-5 medium russet potatoes, peeled and cubed (about 1/2"), rinsed, thoroughly dried
clarified butter
roughly ground cumin
coarse sea salt

Melt a couple of tablespoons of clarified butter in a heavy-bottomed sauté pan. When very hot, add the potatoes. Resist the urge to toss constantly, but instead allow them to brown nicely on a side before turning with tongs or long chopsticks (I am lately a convert to the latter for fine control). When well-browned on several sides, you can begin tossing them, along with the roughly ground cumin, further browning and cooking through. If at any point the pan seems dry, add a bit more butter.

When well-browned and easily pierced by a fork, remove with a slotted spoon to a dish thickly lined with paper towels to drain away the grease and fat. You may go through several changes of paper. When mostly dry and crisp, toss generously with coarse salt and serve immediately.

Smashed roasted young potatoes

Here is an excellent alternative to typical mashed potatoes, made richer by roasting and more textural by keeping the skins on the potatoes.

1 lb of young or fingerling potatoes, quartered, unpeeled
3-4 shallots, sliced paper thin
2 cloves garlic, smashed and finely diced
extra virgin olive oil
1 cup heavy cream
fine sea salt

Preheat the oven to 325.

Toss the potatoes, olive oil, and salt together and lay evenly in a ceramic baking dish. Place in the heated oven and slow-roast at no more than 325 until they can be smashed easily through the tines of a fork--over an hour.

In a heavy pan on the stovetop over a very low heat, caramelize the shallots with just a small taste of olive oil.

When the potatoes are roasted and the shallots brown and caramelized, combine in a deep saucepan with the cream, garlic, and more salt to taste. Smash together with a wooden spoon, stirring thoroughly to even out the texture a bit, until the liquid is absorbed and the potatoes creamy. Serve.

The Spirit of '68

Afghanistan is not Iraq. Indeed, it’s a whole new ballgame and one where there is no real goal. We have heard of long term goals, short term goals, winning the hearts and minds goals, the stability (whatever that means) goals, realistic goals, unrealistic goals, in fact there have been shoals of goals and all of them have one thing in common. None of them explain just what the fuck we are doing in Afghanistan.

By all accounts al Qaieda has been dismantled and scattered. The Taliban are not al Qaieda but an entirely separate entity. And is shifting the Terror Wars from Iraq (who our leaders seem to forget had nothing to do with al Qaieda) to Afghanistan really the change people hoped for when they voted for Obama?

-Rob Payne at Halcyon Days

I shall mightily refrain from commenting on the people who voted for Obama, hoping for change.

Many anti-Iraq-War Progressives nonetheless got behind Obama's rhetoric of escalation, soon to be program of escalation, in Afghanistan out of a desire to to help him prove "his martial bona fides while running as the ostensible peace candidate. The Donk's committment to escalation even as he purports to be antiwar is a source of constant amusement at Who Is IOZ? headquarters, and we raise our shot glasses in salute to overcoming cognitive dissonance and killing foreigners For Their Own Good™." (Musings, multiple, here.) But with al Qaeda dispersed to regroup as a regional irritant in East Africa, at least for the time being, Rob's query as to what the fuck we're doing increasing our commitments to the Subcontinental borderlands deserves attention.

First, related developments. Our supply lines are taxed and vanishing quickly. Bad Vlad recalls the gleeful American backing of the Mujahadeen and the emasculated Soviet Empire limping from Afghanistan to the mother-bosom of its own fast-approaching doom, and will now glory in denying the US foothold in Central Asia. Western political and media types crow about Russia's declining fortunes and the certainty of the Bear's ultimate compliance due to the declining price of certain fungible natural commodities, but as the Ukraine-EU gas imbroglio demostrated, Russian assertiveness is by no means on the wain, and let's also not forget that although the spiraling profits of the Russian petrol industry are constrained of late, these mostly nationalized energy resources still provide positive revenue for their economy, which is more than you can say for the Western powers. The specter of the United States, which is the debtor economy, lecturing Russia, which is not, in full American self-congratulatory style on the feebleness of its economy in the $40/barrel era tickles. Russia sees a strategic interest in getting America out of its backyard and has to tools to do so.

America has no clarity about the purpose of its presence in Afghanistan. Obama has already stated in clear terms that his administration will not brook starry-eyed projects to create Jeffersonian democracy in Afghanistan, and that's commendable as far as it goes, but one notes that exchanging an impossibility for an abstraction is no mark of realist acumen. "Stability," the currently desired outcome, has a certain amorphous quality, no? The central Afghan government is illegitimate. The Taliban, despite the persistence of acid-throwing stories in Western media, have actually moderated somewhat over the past several years in order to garner more popular support in the territories they now control, which are widespread. With the exception of the garrisoned capital city, the situation on the ground now is not altogether dissimilar from 2001, except that in the interim we have also managed to aid in the rapid disintegration of central authority in Pakistan. Oops.

Newsweek recently ran a piece asking if Afghanistan was to become Obama's Vietnam. The predictable progressives aired their predictable outrage that just two weeks into his rule, anyone would have the temerity to raise the question, but they remained silent on the more salient point, which is how exactly the question or comparison is inapt. Well, there are a thousand small differences, but the narrative arc is strikingly familiar. Obama seems to self-imagine himself as the great mediator. Temperamentally and intellectually, he seems committed to notions of "bringing people to the table." Though not burdened with the "CEO President" moniker, the Obama Administration far more than Bush's speaks in goo-goo management tones. But Afghanistan is not composed of "stakeholders." Obama has so far proven inept at mediating the marginal differences between Washington's palace factions. His apparent plans to do so in Afghanistan are as yet more doubtful.

Your God and My God Sittin' in a Tree

Obama, in prepared remarks, said, "There is no God who condones taking the life of an innocent human being."

I can think of a couple . . . dozen. The holy books of the Christians and Jews are full of instances of God commanding the the slaughter of innocents. He even does it himself on occasion. Then again, he also spares whole cities of the guilty on pain of one righteous man. His attitude in these regards is a bit schizo, as befits the power-mad Angry Dad in the Sky.

Likewise, apologists for Islam call it a "religion of peace" and critics find within the Koran all sorts of bloody nonsense, when of course, it contains both, because like all religions it is an insane, primitive set of superstitions that is neither coherent nor consistent. Pagans were generally better on this point, as their gods of limited attributes behaved rather like the dark superheroes of the seventies and eighties, one moment saviors, the next villains in thrall to Acton's iron law--but always and thoroughly human.

Americans being generally fond of encomiums to bland, deracinated, ecumenical, content-free "faith," Obama also stressed that faith should not be used "as a tool to divide us from one another"--this, of course, being precisely the purpose of so many religions, especially the religions of the book, which strive above all else to distinguish believers from infidels, faithful from apostate. The Jews call themselves the Chosen People, for Buddha's sake. Islam erected vast edifices of law and commentary on the question of cohabiting with various forms and types of non-believer.

It would be one thing for the President to encourage us to learn civil coexistence in the face of difference. Hey, worked for the Romans, more or less, or for the Andalusian caliphates. It is another entirely to claim that existence of specific doctrinal traditions obliterates distinction and division.

Numerology

The Constitution is a flawed document, but the Bill of Rights is pretty damn radical indeed. That said, the 3rd Amendment is mostly an anachronism, you could fairly and convincingly argue that the 4th-8th no longer effectively obtain, and that the 9th and 10th have de facto been repealed, effaced from historical and jurisprudential memory.

The French conveniently subdivide their post-Revolutionary history into numbered Republics. Makes reference easier and all. America might do the same, with our First Republic lasting from the promulgation of the Constitution and Bill of Rights to the Civil War, the Second lasting through the brief era of Reconstruction, the Third lasting through the period of expansion and Empire through the First World War, the Fourth beginning under Roosevelt and lasting through the early years of the Truman Administration, the Fifth beginning at the creation of the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the apparati of the Cold War, and the Sixth and current starting with the fall of the USSR, the Gulf War, and the stewardship of George H.W. Bush.

Prime Ministerium

Mobetta!

Watching the Pwog take body shots year in, year out from his elected goons, you almost begin to pity him. The cracked proceduralism is so charmingly earnest:

Clearly, the top of the party has learned zip in the past 8 to 10 years or so. I think it's time to work seriously to replace them. This isn't a progressive vs. centrist issue, this is a competence issue. The current crop of Democratic leaders in Congress simply appear incapable of standing up to the malicious wackiness of Republicans.

Time to replace them? You and what caucus, brother?

The scuttling of this overladen grab-bag of half-baked giveaways, highway-funding, tax complications, and nativist gasbaggery actually commends the GOP congresscreatures to my dark faggot heart. At least they're capable of a little creative obstructionism, something the gelatinous Donk minority was never able to muster.

I know that Superjesus Black Reagan is supposed to be invested with the full Mandate of Heaven, but all the pipsqueak squeals of displeasure as he fails to get his way without question at every juncture in his young Presidency are unseemly at best. These people really do want a sort of parliamentary dictator; George Bush and the Republican Congresses are their ideal form; they just wore the wrong colors.

The Devil Weed Wears Speedo

Kathleen Parker is the best columnist at the Washington Post. That may be damning with faint praise, but still. I mean: sane; insane. Parker:

Other better-known former tokers include our current president and a couple of previous ones, as well as a Supreme Court justice, to name just a few. A complete list would require the slaughter of several mature forests.

This we know: Were Phelps to run for public office someday and admit to having smoked pot in his youth, he would be forgiven. Yet, in the present, we impose monstrous expectations on our heroes. Several hand-wringing commentaries have surfaced the past few days, lamenting the tragic loss for disappointed moms, dads and, yes, The Children.

Understandably, parents worry that their kids will emulate their idol, but the problem isn't Phelps, who is, in fact, an adult. The problem is our laws -- and our lies.

Obviously, children shouldn't smoke anything, legal or otherwise. Nor should they drink alcoholic beverages, even though their parents might.

There are good reasons for substance restrictions for children that need not apply to adults.

That's the real drug message that should inform our children and our laws, rather than the nonsense that currently passes for drug information.

Today's anti-drug campaigns are slightly wonkier than yesterday's "Reefer Madness," but equally likely to become party hits rather than drug deterrents. One recent ad produced by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy says: "Hey, not trying to be your mom, but there aren't many jobs out there for potheads." Whoa, dude, except maybe, like, president of the United States.

Once a kid realizes that pot doesn't make him insane -- or likely to become a burrito taster, as the ad further asserts -- he might figure other drug information is equally false. That's how marijuana becomes a gateway drug.

Phelps may be an involuntary hero to this charge, but his name and face bring necessary attention to a farce in which nearly half the nation are actors. It's time to recognize that all drugs are not equal -- and change the laws accordingly.

Michael Wilbon, meanwhile:

It doesn't matter that "everybody else is doing it," because my bet is that everybody else smoking pot at that student party at the University of South Carolina doesn't have endorsement deals worth $100 million. They haven't courted the concept of being a role model and selling cellphones and cereal to mothers and grandmothers and little children.

Mothers and grandmothers and little children, who are THE FUTURE!

Weed is fun and harmless. A world in which a miserable guy with a lousy job and a dick boss can knock off and burn one down instead of knocking off, hitting the bar, and then smacking his wife and kid is a better world.

The idea that "everyone is doing it"--at least, a significant plurality is doing it--doesn't constitute a moral defense of the practice is tendentious at best, and even flies in the face of our own Supreme Court, which has in other matters has noted "evolving standards of decency." After decades of prohibition, Americans have roundly concluded that smoking marijuana isn't bad, and the fact that we continue to waste blood (mostly other peoples') and treasure defending ourselves from our own largest cash crop is perhaps our greatest single example of the sunk costs fallacy, the notion that after all those billions of dollars and millions of incarcerations and thousands of lousy ads, quitting now, so to speak, would be giving up.

Let's have one other gaudy night: call to me / All my sad captains; fill our bowls once more; / Let's mock the midnight bell

Joe the Plumber has completed his coup and is now the Ruler of the GOP, and Sarah Palin is his pagan queen. Together they will plot the downfall of Barack Hussein Caesar Augustus Obama, until their years of debauched Alaskan orgies and moose hunts and jello shots catch up to them and they commit glorious joint suicide by clutching Alaska Jellyfish to their breasts.

Annals of Evasion

Hoho. Democrats love taxes but hate to pay them, and Republicans hate taxes but hate Democrats who don't pay them even more. Tom Daschle can't not fix our healthcare problems with industry-friendly non-solutions because he forgot to pay taxes on the quintillion dollars he made as a lobbyist for the health care industry that Barack Obama wanted him to pretend to destroy, and Nancy Killefer can't monitor the government's books because she did not pay unemployment taxes for her legions of servants.

Last year I claimed that the entire square footage of my house and yard were a home office and that every dinner party I threw was a business expense. Then I blew my stimulus check on weed and cocaine. This makes me morally better than the Obama Administration, but worse than Michael Phelps, a position I am more than happy to occupy . . . forever.

Quote du jour

From Cüneyt:

While George W. Bush merely perpetuated aristocracy, Obama expanded it!

In a World in which The Wire Never Gained a Distributor . . .

Do your reading on education and you will find an emerging consensus. Abolish tenure. There are other ways to ensure that teachers are fairly treated without guaranteeing the jobs of the inept. (Cops don't have tenure, and neither do columnists.) Ensure that the best teachers teach at the most challenging schools and ensure also that they get paid lavishly for doing so.

-Funnyman Cohen

Dear Richard Cohen,

Meet the Fraternal Order of Police.

What were you saying about ineptitude?

Your brother in labor,
IOZ

Bang! Zoom! Straight to the Moon, Alice!

You've got to give it to the Iranians. Under crushing international sanctions and the constant threat of devastating violence from the United States, they've nonetheless managed to develop a civilian nuclear industry and domestic space program. Triumph in the face of adversity.

Felix

Pace Wagner, and contra the legions of conservatory students who still believe that ripping Mendelssohn is a mark of musical sophistication, happy birthday:

You've Got to Admit Things May or May Not Be Getting Better, Depending on Your Definition of Better, All the Time

This little item came along, happily, as I was pondering the dissociation of consciousness that my incurable-Obamaphile friends seem to be practicing. They won't actually defend any of the things I enjoy mentioning to them -- rocket attacks on Pakistani villages, for example. But there's a look on their faces that suggests I'm somehow being pedantic, or silly, or rude.

This is why I'm sometimes tempted to argue that people like Obama are actually worse than people like Bush, at least for the moral character of liberals. Back when Bush was kidnapping and torturing pro imperio, my liberal friends were quite willing to deplore these things. But now that Obie is doing it, it's sorta tacky to bring it up in good society, and there seems to be a tacit agreement that it would be asking far too much to demand that he stop it.

-The Genuine Mister Smiff

Whether progressive or soi-disant leftist or some other minor form in the Linnean bestiary of willful complicits, there is a marked tendency, when confronted with the indefinable nature and ultimate futility of popular notions of progress, to throw up the American Civil Rights movement as a sort of ultimate trump argument--The Most Benighted Minority, through soul-force satyagraha and a few lucky turns with Les Suprèmes, making marked improvement in their collective life-station. I am reminded of Sartwell's apt moniker: Martin Luther King with a nuclear arsenal. Which is to pose a question about the nature of progress, the nature of success. Blacks now have the option of "success," such that Condi Rice and Colin Powell and, more yet, Barack Obama can terrorize Pakistani tribesmen and render tender bodies to other nations for torture.

Meanwhile, of those not fully coopted into the imperial system, can we really say, they're better off? Let's define our terms. Is a young black man living in Anacostia or West Baltimore or Homestead really living a less constrained life? Were more killed per capita by Southern lynch mobs, or is that far outstripped by the endemic urban street violence that came with the prohibitory drug-war regime? Aren't more in prison now than then?

Notions of progress and those who disseminate them stubbornly resist examining the premises of progress because perceived gains are so often revealed as counterbalancing equal losses. You know, change, to take the current talisman, isn't an unfettered good; it largely exists any kind of qualitative, good-bad judgments we might make anyway.

I'm Gonna Burn One Down

Among other fishy numbers in this losing-the-drug-war boilerplate from the Times is the idea that there exists some stoned moron willing to pay $6K/pound wholesale for weed, no matter how good. Thems retail prices, boy.

Anyway, marijuana is one of the easiest of all crops, a hardy, resilient plant that's adaptable to different climates and soils. It's cheap to grow. The inflated values have to do with the cost of bringing it to market. Remove those impediments, and that shit'll vie with tomatoes. And when was the last time you saw a border shoot-out over a ton of beefsteaks?

Oh, well.

Now I Can Come

I am the mook who spent the last two weeks telling people that no matter what happened, no matter how splendid the victory, no matter how ruthless the destruction, no matter how excellent a game the Superbowl might be, there was just no way, in terms of Platonic Pure-Form Football, that it could be a better game, a greater demonstration of all that is wonderful and good about the sport, a more heart-stopping display of athleticism, a more thrilling demonstration of tactical brilliance, than the AFC Championship against the Ravens. Yoy and double-yoy. Sixburgh! High on my list of the best Superbowls ever played.

It's the Same, but It's Different

The New York Times quoted a Catholic cardinal who argued that Gaza increasingly "resembled a big concentration camp."

-Walter Reich

Outrageous! A concentration camp, as everyone knows, is a camp where a large population, mostly civilian, is interred and segregated from society, often for a period of years, due to some characteristic of racial or political undesirability, generally under harsh or oppressive conditions, with ingress and egress of people, supplies, humanitarian aid, and so on strictly curtailed or suspended altogether. Whereas Gaza is a small geographic area where a large population mostly civilian, and has been maintained for a period of years, due to certain characteristics of political and racial undesirability, segregated from outside society, under harsh conditions, with ingress and egress of people, supplies, humanitarian aid, and so on strictly curtailed or often suspended altogether.

Clearly a condemnatory verb like "resembles" should be struck.