That disturbing sound you hear is Katharine Graham rolling over in her grave.

Oh, and this “Iraq war” you speak of— isn’t that like all over and stuff, now that the economy’s tanking?

It will be over soon. I’ll just keep repeating that mantra until it is over.

Bean stalk. And hey, it might!

As I’m fond of adding to my comments at the WaPo, it’s a darned shame Warren Buffett never reminded Katherine Graham of the dangers of nepotism.

Wedgewood was talking about his underwear, not history.

I can’t wait until Jeffrey Dahmer is also redeemed by Bizarro World history.

I’d like Homeland Security to get on this report of beans stalking pronto.

Fascivegetables? What will the liebrulz come up with next?

That person floating in the water in that photo? Well, they were underpriveleged to begin with so, heh heh, this worked out pretty well for them.

Cannon … or Gannon?

Oh wait, there’s two of them. So … it took two people to write this piece of shite. Let’s hope it is a genetic defect and not a contagious disease. (Alternate theory: Jeff G. wrote this with his balls.)

I like it when the Post runs these FlopEds, because the comments (eleven pages and counting) are gold:

In a perfect world, Bush/Cheney will be remembered as they appeared in their orange jumpsuits at the Hague.

Or

Seems that the authors realize that Bush’s miserable failures can no longer be spun up for the rubes.

As a last resort, the authors are reduced to telling the goobs that Bush’s greatness will someday be recognized — someday in the far future after the current crop of goobs have all died off.

But instead of this hokey “someday” talk, why don’t the GOP propagandists simply tell us that Bush is a great, successful, honest and respected President as we speak – but that his greatness is only recognized in an alternate universe; an alternate universe to which common goobers are not privy.

Or even

don’t care how history will view Bush jr. He’ll always be, to me, the uncle whose lap you NEVER sat in.

It appears even the pro-Reagan Republicans are coming down on them. Wheee!

I hope that Bush is the worst president in US history. It’s scary to think that he may just be another Bruning.

(He wrote “stock” instead of “stalk” because of that whole Boston accent thing.)

History is going to take a steaming dump all over George W. Bush’s face.

I’m putting that one in my ‘Great Quotes of the Bush Era’ collection.

Seriously, I have a hard time understanding why mainstream publications like the Post are so heavily invested in Bush’s reputation. Everyone else has consigned him to the grease trap of history, and they’re still trying to sell the public on this hapless nosepicker. Simply bizarre.

I hope that Bush is the worst president in US history. It’s scary to think that he may just be another Bruning.

Now that’s depressing. I suspect that Shrub has destabilized the political system more than most people realize, creating an excellent situation for political opportunists and extremists. We’ll see.

Hysterical Woman:

Yeah, that’s certainly a worry and lots of shell-shocked, unemployed Iraq veterans in our populace could certianly push things in that direction.

Sometimes I also wonder if we’re going to end up with an American Caesar within a few election cycles who will simply dispense with the last vestiges of democracy here, and make this a real, straight-up empire.

I’m sure that future historians will look kindly on Bush and Cheney. They’ll work for AEI, or Heritage, or whatever organization sprouts out of the crap with the purpose of defending what, even to Regenery Press, is indefensible.

The ever unctuous George Will also added his voice to the WaPo cacophony today.

The GOP only wins elections win it suppresses turnout and cheats. Here a few hundred words of blather in support of the efforts of my paymasters.
~
1/27/2008 1:09:18 PM

Seriously, I have a hard time understanding why mainstream publications like the Post are so heavily invested in Bush’s reputation.

They’re hedging their bets.

Lou Cannon–isn’t he a Reagan apologist?

Seriously, I have a hard time understanding why mainstream publications like the Post are so heavily invested in Bush’s reputation.

Donald Graham, like Pinch Sulzberger, has more in common with other members of the tycoon class (see Mellon-Scaife, Richard e.g.) than he does with the people who made the WaPo a great newspaper.

That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it. And damn the comment filter to hell. It was only one link!

senlac1066 said,

Lou Cannon–isn’t he a Reagan apologist?

If by apologist, you mean corpse humper, yes.

History is going to take a steaming dump all over George W. Bush’s face.

And the fRightshtag will say “No way that’s dooky, Libtard! That’s the chocolates the Iraqis threw at the Soldiers when they rode through Baghdad on their Ponies of Freedom! Those nuts clearly came from a Snicker’s bar!”

Bush will end up drunk and alone, and die in a tragic bicycle/gopher incident.

Laura Bush will up her meds and pranksters will substitute her for her wax museum copy. No one will notice.

Cheney will move to Dubai, where he will be kidnapped by Saudi-funded Wahabis and become their love slave.

Rumsfeld will die when he accidently waterboards himself while trying to run the neighbors’ kids off his lawn with the garden hose.

Condi Rice will be trampeled to death at a Prada shoe sale.

Seriously, I have a hard time understanding why mainstream publications like the Post are so heavily invested in Bush’s reputation.

Probably because they helped big-time to CREATE his fucking fake reputation, and there’s only so much reality you can acknowledge without revealing the fucking fake integrity of your newspaper.

Wow, it took two Cannons to get this one this far off the compass.

“Nonetheless, politics is ultimately about keeping score”

If that doesn’t tell you pretty much everything you’d ever need to know about the infantile and provincial mindset of the Beltway pundit scene, I don’t know what would.

Bush will be judged in an extremely negative light by historians for 2 reasons:

1) Historians look at internal records and internal communications. In Bush’s case, they deleted about 3 years worth of these. This will not play out very well.

2) They will have video of Bush’ public speaking. There is no way that an objective, detached observer can watch Bush speaking and come to the conclusion that he isn’t a bit dense.

Susan, I love that.

GunTotinSteroidRabbi said,

Bush will be judged in an extremely negative light by historians for 2 reasons:

And I would humbly submit a codicil:
2) They will have video of Bush’ public speaking. There is no way that an objective, detached observer can watch Bush speaking and come to the conclusion that he isn’t a bit dense, and comparing contemporaneous facts with his public statements will show him to be one gigantic frickin’ liar.

Mary Cheney will get de-gayed by Ted Haggard, leave Heather Poe, and marry Larry Craig in a mass Moonie wedding.

Umm, wouldn’t you actually need bean bones to make bean stock?

Ok, I’ll go now…

mikey

There will be a massive scrubbing of the Bush II record when Jenna Bush becomes president in 36 years

Umm, wouldn’t you actually need bean bones to make bean stock?

Those pinto beans are a bitch to debone. Or you could use kidney bones, like making gravy with giblets.

kidney beans, dammit

The kidney bone is not a funny bone.

Conservative communists don’t have a funny bone. Karl Marx said so. They are deboned. Boneless. Their bones have ceased to be.

I tried reading history* backwards, to pick up the subliminal messages and satanic indoctrination, but all I could find was a lot of babble about dinosaur overlords from Alpha Draconis.

* “A History of the Crusades, Vol. III: The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades”.

kidney beans, dammit

As long as they’re not lima beans. I enjoy broccoli, Brussels sprouts, and all manner of beans.

But not lima beans. You have to draw the line somewhere.

Lima beans are the Jews of the Bean Fascists.

Beanofascists.

As a historian, I’d like to remind all the people who keep pointing to Truman’s low approval ratings and subsequent rise in our estimation of the context:

Truman plunged into the low-20s as a result of his firing of Douglas MacArthur in April 1951, after repeated acts of insubordination in the Korean War, and at the point at which MacArthur was calling for (and nearly provoking) World War III with China. In the immediate term, Truman’s stock plummeted, but as people learned the facts about the case — including MacArthur’s desire to drop several dozen nuclear bombs on China and create a “belt of radioactive cobalt” across the country — they realized their mistake.

Historians, and the public at large, have come to realize that Truman was, of course, right to fire MacArthur for his usurpation of civilian authority. Truman’s stock has risen not because his foreign policy aggression was proven wise in retrospect — as advocates of the Bush rebound theory tend to assume — but because his caution was. That’s a huge difference.

In time, I’m confident that the longterm ramifications of Bush’s actions — not just in a reckless foreign policy, but in terms of the damage to the economy and the neglect of the infrastructure, the governmental failures in Katrina, the panicked damage to civil rights and the Constitution, the partisanship, etc. etc. — will surely look worse, not better.

Put it this way: This administration has done an excellent job in suppressing or destroying large amounts of behind-the-scenes records. But in due time, much of that will all come out, through FOIA document releases or, more likely, tell-all accounts from insiders after the fact. When all that this administration is trying to keep secret sees the light of day, I simply can’t imagine it’s going to make them look better.

Truman was a lima bean lover.

Lentils are beans’ cousins and are used in Middle Eastern cooking. Therefore lentils are Islamojihadists.

You know, I’m not sure there was much in the Hoover administration that I find funny.

Now COOLIDGE, there’s a laugh riot!

Please. Don’t get me started on lentils.

The first thing Reagan did when he moved into the White House was tear out Jimmy Carter’s rooftop lentil garden.

It’s time that all right-thinking Americans were aware that ‘lima’ spelled backwards is ‘amil’, which is similar to ‘Amal’, which was a Lebanese Shiite militia that eventually merged with Hezbollah. And ‘Hezbollah’ spelled backwards is ‘Hallo, Bzeh’, which could be a garbled version of ‘Howdy, Beelzebub.’

Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Hoover’s a recent failure?

The accomplishments of George W. Bush don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.

Lentils are beans’ cousins and are used in Middle Eastern cooking. Therefore lentils are Islamojihadists.

An immature person would make silly jokes about “fartwas,” the explosive effects of lentils and how a good “surge” can put an end to the carnage.

Thank goodness I’m above that sort of thing.

We all know — or think we do — what things are like in our union now… But we don’t know how the story will turn out.

<<<<<<<< SPOILER ALERT >>>>>>>>

Douglas Hall [played by Craig Bierko] discovers that he is actually a character occupying a computer simulation. He manages to transfer himself into the body of his counterpart in the real world. He gets the girl.

A quibble: this is not an editorial, but rather an opinion piece; it’s signed by the authors, rather than being the unsigned opinion of the WaPo editorial board. So, slightly better. Very very slightly.

Defending beans is a full time job with the sort of perks that keep our flinty eyed pragmatist job seeking bean O’File sharp ‘n Flinty .
Accepting resumes from reputable nitrogen bearing supplicants on Tuesdays .
Everyone else has to wait .

“Quibble” means “lentil” in pashtu.

…so heavily invested in Bush’s reputation.
They’re hedging their bets.
It’s been 3 hours since g’s comment, and still no shrubbery jokes. Disappointing.

luneylegume, I’ve taken the liberty of forwarding your position announcement to a uniquely qualified individual.

Sadly,No! Love Advice:

Gentlemen, serve more chick peas.

“Hey Ma! Hows ’bout another heapin’ bowlful of them de-licious quibbles?!?”

tomemos: Horse hockey. The paper that brought down Richard Nixon now spit-shines Chimpy McDrunktard’s pre-posthumous reputation? It should hang its head in shame. The paper, not the pp-reputation. huhhh huhh, I said pee-pee.

… said Ahkmed, hungrily.

So we can indeed reach a short-term political judgment of George W. Bush: He is a disaster — if not the worst president of all time, then at least the worst since Carter, Hoover or any other recent failure. But who knows how the story will end?

Why do they need him to look good several generations down the road? He was a major fuck up and they were major fuck ups for supporting him, and no amount of bleach in the brainwashing tub is going to erase the ugly memories.

Well, it’s a big relief to know that in 50 years the world will understand this:

Channel Icon

Some people try to take the pleasure out of great moments in history by pointing out the great Ponsonby Britt observations that include the denouements at the nadirs climax .
I could go on at great length about nadir but it requires a certain , how do you say , effort .
This course of reasoning being something admired best from afar . Of course , of course .

Bush’s defenders are a couple of guys named Lou and Carl ?

Yeah, that should work.

Second attempt for you tube linki

YouTube – George W. Bush at his best : Fool me once….

I think this is only the second time in history, I’m going to have to part ways with my man thunder.

Now, it must be said that Lima beans are not delicious in the sense of fish tacos or a perfect Pho, but they are orders of magnitude better than that bane of the vegetable world, brussels sprouts, in that they are without doubt quite edible.

The same cannot be said for the organic toxic substance called brussels sprouts…

mikey

Bush and Blair – Endless Love
~

My problem with lima beans is the combination of bland taste and mealy texture.

The result is they make me want to hurl, and they always have.

Speaking of Bush and Blair…

#

The result is they make me want to hurl, and they always have.

A high quality lima bean doesn’t just make you want to hurl – it will make you hurl. The beauty comes after the hurl.

You’re probably buying your limas at Ralphs or Safeway. Those are basically seeds and stems. I can hook you up with the good stuff.

ITDGY, fresh lima’s are quite good; those dried and reconsituted ones are, well, mealy.

I just cooked up a batch of islamofascist lentil stew; I’m planning on having the local jihadi cell over for snacks and a fatwa.

But the real question is how will future historians judge the epic “Vegetable Wars” of SadlyNo? Can a respectable Liberal Fascist serve brussels sprouts with a light hollandaise? Can advanced nano tech curb the “explosive” side effects of lentil soup? Only in the future can we know for sure.

The result is they make me want to hurl, and they always have.
Open a tin of refried beans — you’ll get the same result, with less trouble.

We used to grow limas in our family garden when I was a child, so I’ve had them as fresh you can have them. Hated them, but I had to eat some EVERY DAMN TIME mom cooked them, as she ALWAYS said “try this, you’ve never had them before.” Holy CRAP, Mom, we’ve had them ALMOST EVERY DAY OF EVERY SUMMER SINCE I’VE BEEN ALIVE.

I’m still a little bitter.

tigrismus – hell, you had it golden. My mom used to serve us Veg-All. Just the smell alone makes you nauseous. I’ve asked her about it and she always kind of laughs, agrees that it was horrid and says, well, I figured it was an easy way to get some vegetables into you. Except that it wasn’t, because we would spit it out into our napkins. It’s a wonder I can eat vegetables at all given this early trauma.

Hell, I’d prefer Veg-All to limas, and I’ll even write a new motto for them– Veg-All: it’s only 1/10 lima beans!

Wedgewood was talking about his underwear, not history.

HER underwear! Don’t disrespect Dame Cicely Wedgwood. She was a mighty historian and worth a million revisionists like Doughbob or truthless toadies like the loose Cannons.

HER underwear! Don’t disrespect Dame Cicely Wedgwood. She was a mighty historian…

…and the inventor of the wedgie.

(Sorry, couldn’t resist. She really was an excellent historian.)

Susan of Texas said,

Bush will end up drunk and alone, and die in a tragic bicycle/gopher incident.

Laura Bush will up her meds and pranksters will substitute her for her wax museum copy. No one will notice.

Cheney will move to Dubai, where he will be kidnapped by Saudi-funded Wahabis and become their love slave.

Rumsfeld will die when he accidently waterboards himself while trying to run the neighbors’ kids off his lawn with the garden hose.

Condi Rice will be trampeled to death at a Prada shoe sale.

“You may say
I’m a dreamer.
But I’m not the only one…”

Conclusive photographic evidence of Wedgwood viewing events in a mirror so as to write history backward.

Not to mention the Reverend Swank’s observation that “Written backward is history but forward lived.”

“Lou Cannon–isn’t he a Reagan apologist?”

Y’know, Cannon covered St. Ronnie (LA Times, I think) in the 60’s before and after his election as governor, and has written a multi-volumed biography which, as I recall, was actually very good – in the same way that Caro’s LBJ and Ambrose’s Nixon bios were solid.

I guess these guys just stick around longer than they should. They just don’t know when to disappear to a nice fishing shack on the Eastern Shore or something.

David Broder is probably in his late 90’s by now, but he actually had a thing or two to say that was worth listening to back in the early 70’s.

They just need to step away from their typewriters before they start drooling all over them. It’s just too embarrassing for everybody otherwise.

David Broder is probably in his late 90’s by now, but he actually had a thing or two to say that was worth listening to back in the early 70’s.

In the early 70’s, Dave Broder was warning the Democrats not to make Nixon mad, because daddy would break the Constitution and nobody could have nice things anymore.

Dave Broder is still paid to be this stupid. And that is a crying shame.

I’ve heard that Cannon’s Reagan bio was good, though I’ve never read it. Caro’s biography of LBJ has some serious problems.

“Caro’s biography of LBJ has some serious problems.”

Like what?

I’ve really liked the first 3 volumes (though since it’s been dragged out so long, I think I read the first 2 (Path to Power, Means of Ascent) about 15 years ago and the 3rd (Master of the Senate) at least 3, and maybe even 5, years ago.)

I don’t think his final volume on the presidency is out yet (gonna go check Amazon).

Dave Broder is still paid to be this stupid. And that is a crying shame.

I can remember people speculating on whether Broder was becoming senile back in 1992, and he’s still successfully marketing his drivel sixteen years later. It’s surreal.

“Caro’s biography of LBJ has some serious problems.”
———————-
Like what?

The worst criticisms were about the second volume, Means of Ascent. Among other things, Caro described the 1948 senatorial election as a bad guy / good guy contest between the Machiavellian LBJ and the virtuous Coke Stevenson. That was bullshit; Johnson was certainly a major-league asshole, but Stevenson was a miserable reactionary shit and plenty of eyewitnesses to the 1948 campaign called Caro on it. His reply, if I remember, was something along the lines of “Accuracy isn’t as important as telling a good story.” I’ve never trusted the guy since. Here’s a review by Gary Wills that covers some of the crap.

Caro’s most recent volume got good reviews (though with some reservations), but I’m still very wary of him.

Fresh lima beans? Veg-all? Ha! What I would have given for fresh lima beans and Veg-all! My mother served us canned spinach. She’d always set vinegar on the table to pour onto the vile stuff to mask the flavor. I sometimes think of doing a survey study of Boomer children of ’50s- and ’60s-era women who, contrary to their innermost desires, capitulated to the post-WWII mandate to have babies and stay home with the gleaming white major appliances and, in retribution for their domestic servitude, served their children, whom they secretly resented, such horrors as canned spinach. And canned fruit cocktail with a few dollops of “salad dressing” (i.e., cheap fake mayo) stirred in. Don’t get me started on the Jiffy® mix corn muffins and the navy beans cooked for about three days with the revolting ham bone left over from Sunday dinner bobbing about in the surface scum.

No, I’m not bitter, either.

OK, you win. Damn.

We used to do fruit with mayo, too: canned peach or pear halves with a spoonful in the cavity, and with half a maraschino cherry on top. Who came up with the canned fruit/mayo combo? There’s gotta be a special place in Hell for that horrible person. At least the cherry was good.

I liked the canned spinach and the navy beans with the ham-bone, perverted as that sounds. The scalloped potatoes with the weird ersatz flavor and the weiners with undercooked strips of bacon wrapped around them were a bit much, though.

We used to do fruit with mayo, too: canned peach or pear halves with a spoonful in the cavity, and with half a maraschino cherry on top.

I remember that, too. The maraschino cherry left a little red stain on the pears – red dye #3. How come everyone served the same strange-ass stuff?

Two words: Canned. Asparagus.

Completely undeserved green pee. I still have stressful family-dinner dreams 40 years later . . .

Two words: Canned. Asparagus.

Vile, evil.

God, I haven’t tasted any of this stuff for decades, but I can still remember the texture of canned asparagus and the shape of the red stain left by the maraschino cherries. Weird Atomic Age food seared itself into my memory.

The scalloped potatoes with the weird ersatz flavor and the weiners with undercooked strips of bacon wrapped around them were a bit much, though.

Were the potatoes dried? We had those, they were pretty darn odd. We didn’t have bacon-wrapped weinies, but Mom would wrap those horrible biscuits-in-a-tube around hot dogs to make pseudo pigs-in-blankets for breakfast sometimes. A favorite dinner was hamburger patties with cream of mushrooms soup over them, with sides of mashed potatoes and canned peas. Never had canned asparagus, though, thank $Diety!

Damn. I missed a bunch of that. But I had our own special weirdness. My dad was a hardcore hunter, and a phenomenal shot. He would fuck with his buddies and my uncles by only taking along one round for each deer tag he had. If he had two tags, he take two rounds. I honestly never saw that motherfucker (and oh yeah, he was all of that) miss. He’d discovered over the years that if you hit a deer behind the ear (he was one of the wildcatters that developed a lot of the varmint rounds, his contributions ran towards his favorites, .22-250 and .250-3000), it wouldn’t secrete a lot of panic stuff, because you shut it down instantly, and you would just have to slit it’s throat when you got there. He pretty much never had to track a wounded deer, at least when I was there.

My mom was became a whiz at making the venison and duck and all the game he and his friends would kill. But it was also the late fifties and early sixties, and she totally grooved on the new “convenience” foods and tv dinners and ready-made crap.

So we either ate fabulous dinners of game or frozen horrors. And my parents couldn’t seem to tell the difference. Until the day she died, my mom loved stuff like banquet chicken and stouffers dinners. And it was fucking awful, because that woman could kick it out in the kitch. She just didn’t value the skill set she had. And she was convinced technology would make it utterly unnecessary.

mikey

Were the potatoes dried?

Yeah, I think so. They never fully rehydrated, and didn’t really taste like potatoes. Somebody in my family loved the damn things and they were served all the time.

As for cream of mushroom, much later, in my days of severe hippie poverty, I lived for extended periods on a diet of spaghetti and Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup alternating with Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat. I don’t know how I avoided scurvy.

So we either ate fabulous dinners of game or frozen horrors.

My parents thought that even the most skanky TV dinners were really cool, some kind of major technological advance in eating that should be savored by the whole family. Invariably, we watched television when we were served TV dinners, like it was a formal rule.

I never had game until I was an adult. The dad of a friend of mine would make venison sausage every year, and he knew what he was doing. Jesus!

Two words: Canned. Asparagus.

You know how your pee smells funny after you eat fresh asparagus? That’s what canned asparagus smells like, right out of the can. I bet they process it in asparagus-pee.

The first time I ate fresh asparagus, I asked what it was and my dinner mate said, “Asparagus.” I thought she was fucking with me.

Enough already of these Weird Atomic Age food stories… I demand sympathy for childhood exposure to a cuisine that emerged from the English post-war austerity years. Suffice to say that my horror stories involve tripe. With onion sauce.

I would have killed for canned asparagus. My Mom used to take fresh asparagus, put it in a big pot of boiling water, and then go play three sets of tennis. It ended up like pale green flavorless pudding with zero nutritional value, but of course we “had to eat our vegetables”. I think she was trying to starve us to death.

Bush will end up drunk and alone, and die in a tragic bicycle/gopher incident.

do you not mean, tragic, yet hilarious….

I hope he’ll commit suicide alone in a bunker like another beloved fuhrer, but this time it won’t be the Red Army approaching, but officials of the Hague war crimes tribunals.

That, or the remainders of our Air Force after the empire is defeated bomb his little hidey-hole in Paraguay, (land of escaped liberal “fascists”, accd. to a certain semi-solid Pantload)

Space Sticks and Tang. Now, that’s a real diet…

I demand sympathy for childhood exposure to a cuisine that emerged from the English post-war austerity years.

I’ve been bitching about what my parents dished out, but they grew up in the Midwest during the Depression. I imagine whatever they ate made rubbery scalloped potatoes seem like haute cuisine.

Thanks for the Wills linky, Snorg.

In an election between an over-ambitious asshole and a reactionary thug, who wins?

The food stories are funny and enlightening. Sunday dinners were always from scratch, not fancy but fresh. Since mom worked weekdays, those suppers were usually sketchy/on your own.

But Sunday dinner was the best, and afterwards everybody pushed their chairs back from the table and lit up (cigarettes).

Bush will end up drunk and alone, and die in a tragic bicycle/gopher incident.
do you not mean, tragic, yet hilarious….
Much depends on whether or not the gopher is injured.

I think my mother thought (still thinks) fresh vegetables are bad for you. Everything came out of a can. I still cannot eat peas. One thing she did do, though, was make homemade chocolate eclairs, like at least once a week. I hated when she started working and we got not more eclairs.

Oops, should be no more eclairs. Also, more on topic, I hate Bush beans.

Snorghagen: As poverty-level undergrads the spouse and I lived for several years on [shudder] Hamburger Helper. Sometimes we’d do a package of frozen vegetables in butter sauce on Rice-A-Roni for dinner. I also remember the Betty Crocker potatoes au gratin packages of freeze-dried potato-ish hard chips with an envelope of garish-orange cheese-like powdered stuff.

When my kids were growing up and I served the little ingrates my own fabulous from-scratch macaroni and cheese, lovingly made with hand-grated sharp white cheddar and half-and-half, they’d whine for the Velveeta Shells & Cheese served at their day-care center.

Nowadays I’m vegetarian and an aficianado of food that’s as fresh and organic as possible. When told I’m a picky eater, I inflict my stories of past food traumas on them.

Also, the thing about canned asparagus: It’s what you want when you make asparagus casserole, layering canned spears with hard-boiled egg slices and covering it all with homemade cheese sauce then baking for 30 minutes or so. The reason you do this is solely to use it as leftovers the next day on toast for breakfast.

Smut Clyde: I can extend to you sympathy by proxy: The spouse also suffered through childhood meals of tripe. His momma made chitlins and calves’ brains, too. As someone mentioned a while back, the very rich and the very poor will eat anything.

As poverty-level undergrads the spouse and I lived for several years on [shudder] Hamburger Helper.

Oh yeah, I remember that shit. Also dried mashed potatoes (not too bad when rehydrated with milk) and at one point powdered eggs (pretty awful no matter what).

I remember one year how me and my roommate lived on Bisquick biscuits (made with water, not milk) and jelly for about a week. Spring break was the next week and neither of us had any money or the inclination to call home and beg for any. Most of the time, though, I ate relatively healthy, though there was a lot of spaghetti with marinara. Best of all was when my parents would go to “chicken mart” and buy me 10 lb boxes of breaded chicken fillets. I’d fix those up with oven fries and canned green beans and have a real meal of it.

I ate spaghetti with sugar once when I was out of everything else. I thought I could make it kugel-like, and of course I was wrong.

Try mixing hundreds-&-thousands* with your spaghetti. They don’t do much for the flavour, but the colour effects are psychedelic.

* Translator’s note: “sprinkles”.

Sprinkles make everything better. With the looming economic meltdown, I’m selling everything and investing it all in sprinkles.
[Oh yeah, laughing all the way to the bank…]

mikey: You don’t like Brussels sprouts? You’re breaking my heart, I thought we were soul mates. Try a little butter on ’em.

Smiling Mortician: I have to admit you’re right about the canned asparagus, although I could choke that down. It was the canned green beans that got me. Like chewing thick, moldy cardboard with strings in it.

Gah.

Canned vegetables! The only canned vegetables that my mom served were Blue Lake Green Beans. Cold. I still kinda like them, if you want to know the truth.

My mom was a frozen veg kind of cook. Our freezer had tons of the little waxy boxes of frozen peas, corn, and the fave – “Mixed vegetables” with the little cubes of frozen carrots.

I guess for a 50’s-60’s kid, I made out pretty well. My mom liked the frozen things, but she wasn’t too much of a processed food lover. Spaghetti-O’s, all that? I got those at the homes of my friends. Loved ’em, too, they seemed exotic.

Being a lover of frozen food, my mom did serve us fish sticks and frozen breaded shrimp, which I loved – I don’t think I ate a piece of fresh fish until I was probably 21 years old.

We also were enthusiastic consumers of TV dinners – anyone remember Swanson’s? How about the salisbury steak dinnner with the little cup of sliced apples in the middle? Talk about a treat!

And the acme of classy desserts for my mom was frozen cherry or apple turnovers by Pepperidge Farm.

To this day, my mom still believes Pepperidge Farm is Teh Class.

I think, for me, living in the West Village right out college, coming home from work and walking past the Korean produce stand, Charlie Zito’s bakery, Murray’s Cheese Store and Ottomanelli’s butcher shop on my way home from the subway really gave me the best education on food. I realized you can buy it fresh, the day you cook it.

Damn. Charlie Zito made some fine bread.

Is anyone else up? It’s raining like a sonuvabitch here.

We’re what you really want. Admit it.

Reflecting that historians will likely view George W. Bush as a terrible president is cold comfort indeed. He has created deadly problems for our republic, and he is not finished yet. I fear that a strike on Iran is still planned, before he leaves office. This could lead us into fruitless decades of war and conflict.

Hey, in January 2009, he will become the 44th best President there was !

[…] As I’ve said before, history will not vindicate Bush. It will, in fact, taking a huge steaming dump all over his […]

What about Bush’s role in carrying out 9/11? The full 9/11 writeup as a bonus.

Nazi Germany Spies Hatched The First Family
http://home.att.net/~carlson.jon/TheFirstBunch1.htm