Palin refers to Obama's "cocaine snorting, and what he ate — Fido? Rufus?"

"I think it’s funny that the cocktail circuit gives me a hard time for eating elk and moose. Anybody here have a pet moose? There’s a difference."

Obama does dog-eating jokes at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner.

At 1:30, "What's the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?... A pit bull is delicious."



More here.

What do Bob Dylan, Toni Morrison, John Glenn, and Madeleine Albright have in common?

Obama is giving them all a medal — the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Speaking for freedom, Bob's got an old song called "I Shall Be Free." It says:

Well, my telephone rang it would not stop
It’s President Kennedy callin’ me up
He said, “My friend, Bob, what do we need to make the country grow?”
I said, “My friend, John, Brigitte Bardot
Anita Ekberg
Sophia Loren”
(Put ’em all in the same room with Ernest Borgnine!)

It's not a slow jam, but like that Obama's slow jam the other day, it got that idea that sexual stimulation is what the country needs. (Speaking of old, there's that old Woody Allen joke: "I ... interestingly had, uh, dated ... a woman in the Eisenhower Administration ... briefly ... and, uh, it was ironic to me 'cause, uh . . . 'cause I was trying to, u-u-uh, do to her what Eisenhower has been doing to the country for the last eight years.)

Bob's most famous reference to the President is in "It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)":

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have to stand naked

Lest you think that was sexy-naked, the year was 1965, and the President was LBJ.



Finally, back to the subject of freedom, here's one of my favorite obscure Bob Dylan songs, from the album we listened to all the time in college, "New Morning":

If dogs run free, then why not we
Across the swooping plain?
My ears hear a symphony
Of two mules, trains and rain
The best is always yet to come
That’s what they explain to me
Just do your thing, you’ll be king
If dogs run free

Run, dogs, run!

"Did perpetual happiness in the Garden of Eden maybe get so boring that eating the apple was justified?"

That's the fifth most "liked" quote on the topic of "sin" at goodreads. It's from Chuck Palahniuk, Diary (which is a novel, not a diary). The forth most liked also involves poor old Adam. It's by Mark Twain:

Adam was but human—this explains it all. He did not want the apple for the apple's sake, he wanted it only because it was forbidden. The mistake was in not forbidding the serpent; then he would have eaten the serpent.

But I've heard snake is tough, tougher than dog (and less crunchy than grasshopper).

Sorry for the gratuitous Obama-eats-dog/snake punchline. It was not my motivation to look up quotes. I was actually searching for a quote about boredom, something like the only sin is being boring. Interestingly, the most-liked goodreads quotes on the topic of "boredom" are boring. Seriously, how many ways are there to say If you're bored, it's because you are boring? And now I've lost track of what somebody said that made me what that sin-of-boringness quote, which might not even exist.

“Life is for living and working at. If you find anything or anybody a bore, the fault is in yourself.”
― Elizabeth I

Am I boring you? You must be boring.

IN THE COMMENTS: Sweetbriar and Jody both point me to the answer: Christopher Hitchens, in his memoir, "Hitch-22." Page 13. His mother used to say:  "The one unforgivable sin is to be boring."

And I think what got me looking in the first place was a comment by Patrick over in the "Predictable Althouse Is Predictable" post:

Honestly, when I first came to this blog, back in the day, I assumed that you, a law professor especially at Madison, would be a typical lefty law professor. In fact, I likely put off reading the blog for awhile because I assumed it would be the same old boring lefty stuff. This is a very interesting blog, and your political opinions or votes are part of that, but really, there's a lot more to it. Vote for Ron Paul for all I care, or Dennis Kucinich. Just don't be boring about it!

"As a (presumably) grown man, Barack Obama wrote a memoir in order to promote himself."

"He chose to highlight his dog-eating experience. He calculated that the incident would help portray him as worldly, adventurous, open-minded, and multicultural. But how could he have predicted nearly 20 years ago, when he wrote his story of race and inheritance, that Americans would find it would only paint him as submissive, self-satisfied, and out of touch with mainstream American culture?"

A comment from Meade, on a post from a few days ago, responding to one Kwach, who had trouble understanding what I was saying about Obama and the concept of eating what you're told. She said:

Because a young boy was exposed to a foreign culture (including unusual food) and didn't balk at trying it, he grew up to be ... what? Someone who has no will? And then he married a woman who would tell him and all the children in America what to eat... Does this childhood lack of will extend to anyone who spends time in a foreign country and doesn't refuse to try the local cuisine, or is it possible that some people eat things I wouldn't dream of (escargot and goat meat, for instance) not because they are mindless automatons but because they're open-minded or even curious? Is it possible that some children are open-minded and curious? Or even obedient to their parents, as we say they should be?

Read my post again Kwach. I didn't say that Obama had/has no will.  I said that as an author he willfully deprived us of any words on the subject of his will. He says nothing about the degree of compulsion he felt when he "learned" from Lolo "how to eat." Our erstwhile law professor was a student, taking instruction. We don't know how he felt. He keeps that from us. And now, as President, is he a will-less instructor? Does government coerce or does it merely teach... with more or less persuasive incentives... nudges if you will like.

"Somehow I get the feeling that when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."

Roy Edroso cuts and pastes some of my very best material onto his blog, but leaves me out of his Village Voice column "Dog Soldiers: Rightbloggers Meld with Mitt over Obama Mutt Meal Story." He just doesn't know how to "meld" my material with his "rightbloggers" shtick. It's too meta (and meat-a) for him to grind up into the usual sausages the folk at VV use to metaphorically masturbate.

But I must correct Mr. Edroso. There are 5 errors in the statement "when young Ann Althouse refused to eat the carrots on her dinner plate, her parents just sighed and got out the Cap'n Crunch."


1. "Cap'n Crunch is a product line of sweetened corn and oat breakfast cereals introduced in 1963," and I was already 12 in 1963.  My sweetened corn cereal of choice was Corn Pops, born in 1951, like me. Here I am explaining my cereal preference to 2 guys including a guy who looks like my dad and has a name like some guy in my adopted home town, Guy Madison.

2. Since carrots were never cooked in my 1950s childhood home, but were served raw, I liked them. Now, if it were something like spinach, which my mother always served with slices of hard-boiled egg on top, I would have avoided it, perhaps, along with the other kids in the family, with some simple commentary like "ew, spinach."

3. My parents never sighed about anything like this. At most, they would inform us that we were saying something that wasn't good "dinner conversation" and they would continuing modeling what was to their ear good dinner conversation.

4. My parents wouldn't get up from the dining table and go back into the kitchen to get different food if we didn't want to eat what we were served. They might say something like "That's dinner" and then move on, in the usual fashion, to good dinner conversation.

5. I was left to my own devices at the dinner table, devices I pursued silently and without parental comment or intervention of any kind: I drank milk, I ate plenty of potatoes, and I sprinkled sugar — copiously — on the wedge of iceberg lettuce. Later, after I was excused from the table — we said "May I be excused?" — I ate all the ice cream I wanted.

IN THE COMMENTS: At Roy's, Halloween Jack says:

Althouse probably thinks of her blogging self as a shorter, snappier Maureen Dowd, but she doesn't have the detached hollowness at the heart of MoDo's mean-girl act; she's usually petty, often smug, and when she gets like this, downright creepy. 

If it were a dinner party and she started in on this, people would probably laugh at first, mostly out of politeness, but a strained silence would ensue as she went on and was obviously getting into it. Then she realizes that not only is everyone else silent but almost everyone is averting their gaze; she clears her throat, murmurs "Well, anyway," and drains her wine glass. The guests can hand-wave it away as an odd tic (although one or two might reach for their list of handy excuses on the occasion of subsequent invitations), but on the blog it sits there, generating a veritable miasma like the stench of garbage left in a warm apartment for a week. 

Fortunately from her perspective, unfortunately from anyone else's, she's got her regulars to reinforce her behavior, with Meade piping in with a HuffPo piece about the amount of lead in the White House lawn, and she'll have a virtual dinner party at which she's always the toast of the town.

Enjoy the party!

"The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?"

More meat-oriented education from Lolo, Barack Obama's stepfather, as told by Obama in his memoir "Dreams From My Father." This scene occurs when Obama, age 6, first arrives from Hawaii in his new home in Jakarta:

[T]he man who had carried our luggage was standing in the backyard with a rust-colored hen tucked under his arm and a long knife in his right hand. He said something to Lolo, who nodded and called over to my mother and me. My mother told me to wait where I was and sent Lolo a questioning glance.

“Don’t you think he’s a little young?”

Lolo shrugged and looked down at me. “The boy should know where his dinner is coming from. What do you think, Barry?” I looked at my mother, then turned back to face the man holding the chicken. Lolo nodded again, and I watched the man set the bird down, pinning it gently under one knee and pulling its neck out across a narrow gutter.
For a moment the bird struggled, beating its wings hard against the ground, a few feathers dancing up with the wind. Then it grew completely still. The man pulled the blade across the bird’s neck in a single smooth motion. Blood shot out in a long, crimson ribbon. The man stood up, holding the bird far away from his body, and suddenly tossed it high into the air. It landed with a thud, then struggled to its feet, its head lolling grotesquely against its side, its legs pumping wildly in a wide, wobbly circle. I watched as the circle grew smaller, the blood trickling down to a gurgle, until finally the bird collapsed, lifeless on the grass.

Lolo rubbed his hand across my head and told me and my mother to go wash up before dinner. The three of us ate quietly under a dim yellow bulb—chicken stew and rice, and then a dessert of red, hairy-skinned fruit so sweet at the center that only a stomachache could make me stop. Later, lying alone beneath a mosquito net canopy, I listened to the crickets chirp under the moonlight and remembered the last twitch of life that I’d witnessed a few hours before. I could barely believe my good fortune.

Good fortune? Why does the boy — as remembered by the man — connect the killing of the bird to his own good fortune? Is it some elemental realization that simply to be alive is amazing, the bird being dead? Or is he excited to be in this new place with lots of thrilling new activities like beheading a bird and shortly thereafter eating it? Or is it the connection to the father figure, who's so eager to show the boy what life is really about and so easily overcomes the reticence of the mother? The next thing that happens in the book is that Lolo teaches him how to deal with bullies: Don't cry over the lump where he hit you with a rock; learn boxing. Lolo buys boxing gloves for him and teaches him to "keep moving, but always stay low—don’t give them a target." Good advice!

And it's on the very next page that Lolo teaches him to eat dog (and snake) meat. The dog-meat paragraph begins with them boxing and proceeds to a quick summary of things done in the first 6 months in Indonesia: he'd "learn[ed] Indonesia’s language, its customs, and its legends," he'd "survived chicken pox, measles, and the sting of my teachers’ bamboo switches," he'd made friends with "children of farmers, servants, and low-level bureaucrats," and they'd run about "hustling odd jobs, catching crickets, battling swift kites with razor-sharp lines." The point is: Life was a big adventure. And meat was part of the adventure — meat from real animals that lived and died.

Do you eat meat? If you eat meat, but not dogs, is it because, with respect to the meat that you do eat, you don't know where your dinner is coming from?

Radical Locavore.

A Bizarro cartoon, arrived at via the Wikipedia article "Self-cannibalism," which I found seconds after speculating out loud "I wonder if anyone has ever gotten so hungry they've eaten parts of their own body?," which arose out of a conversation with Meade, who was talking about military training for survival behind enemy lines. For example:

Trainees are taught that when stranded in the field, they should eat what they can find, which can include turtles, snakes, insects and other things normally considered unappetizing. The training helps them overcome their food aversions.

... [A] running joke is that "food is a crutch" because survival school teaches soldiers how to overcome physical stress like hunger by using mental strength.

A Special Forces captain swallows a worm to the delight of his fellow trainees. Asked what it tasted like, the captain said, "Dirt. And kind of like a worm. Kind of fishy. Kind of fishy. "

You can imagine why we were talking about that. Just reabsorbing and digesting the classic Obama text: "I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)."

I was saying: Isn't it interesting that he spoke of the texture, but not the taste? I was going to riff in the direction of portraying Obama as coolly Spock-like — missing one of the 5 senses, but then I veered toward literary analysis. It's a neatly compressed comic line: tough... tougher... crunchy. He sticks with the textures because it's funny to struggle through the tough sequence — tough, tougher — and then get — not what comes next grammatically: toughest — but crunchy! because — ha ha — we all know, whether we eat them or not, that insects are crunchy. In those few words,
you laugh and you're there inside the immediacy of what the small boy experienced. Once there, you can imagine the flood of sensation and emotion for yourself. The author restrains himself. He doesn't bother us with descriptions of how he felt. You've had enough. You've had dog-tough, snake-tougher, grasshopper-crunchy. You were there, eating it too, because you were a boy with a father and what would that be like?

Anyway, I love that there's a Wikipedia article for so many quite specific things that suddenly pop into your head. From the "Self-cannibalism" article:

As a natural occurrence: A certain amount of self-cannibalism occurs unwillingly, as the body consumes dead cells from the tongue and cheeks...

As a disorder or symptom thereof: Fingernail-biting that develops into fingernail-eating is a form of pica, although many do not consider nail biting as a true form of cannibalism....

Who are the true cannibals?

As a choice: Some people will engage in self-cannibalism as an extreme form of body modification, for example eating their own skin. Others will drink their own blood, a practice called autovampirism, but sucking blood from wounds is generally not seen to be cannibalism. Placentophagy may be a form of self-cannibalism. On January 13, 2007, Chilean artist Marco Evaristti hosted a dinner party for his most intimate friends. The main meal was agnolotti pasta, which was topped with a meatball made from the artist's own fat, removed in the previous year in a liposuction operation.

Citations omitted. And I'll spare you the "As a crime" section, which is really unpleasant. The "Cultural references" list is extensive (and suggests that if you can think up anything gross, there are numerous storytellers who've already gone there):

King Erysichthon from Greek mythology ate himself in insatiable hunger, given him, as a punishment, by Demeter.

In an Arthurian tale, King Agrestes of Camelot goes mad after massacring the Christian disciples of Josephus within his city, and eats his own hands.

Stephen King's short story "Survivor Type", about a man trapped on a small island.

King's shipwreck survivor is a heroin smuggler, and the heroin helps him get through the food prep.  There's more on the "Cultural references" list. I won't repeat it all, but it ends with "Radical Locavore."

Eat what you're told — a precept that appears and reappears in the life of Barack Obama.

First, there was the young Obama, as described by Obama himself, in terms of taking instruction from his stepfather:

“With Lolo, I learned how to eat small green chili peppers raw with dinner (plenty of rice), and, away from the dinner table, I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy). Like many Indonesians, Lolo followed a brand of Islam that could make room for the remnants of more ancient animist and Hindu faiths. He explained that a man took on the powers of whatever he ate: One day soon, he promised, he would bring home a piece of tiger meat for us to share.”

Notice how the individual will of the child is missing. The father figure teaches; the child learns how to eat. He receives instruction. He has feelings in that he reports the texture (but not the taste) of the various foods, but we hear absolutely nothing about whether he resisted these impositions or felt any sort of disgust. What happened happened. He was in Indonesia, things were like this there, Lolo had his ideas, and Obama existed in that milieu, which was tough/crunchy and infused with spiritual beliefs.

And now, Obama, President of the United States, is married to a woman who purports to teach us all how to eat. She's not forcing us to do anything. And despite some recent talk on the subject, the government has never undertaken to require us to eat broccoli. But young Obama wasn't forced to eat dog. He "learned." He was "introduced." (Fido, meet Barack. Barack, meet Fido... meat Fido.) It's instruction, not compulsion.

And maybe you will eat what you're told.

Children.

The Obama-eats-dog story is needed to nullify the Shame-of-Seamus tale.

I understand why Obama opponents are frying this story to a crisp, e.g., James Taranto:

One time Barack Obama went to an Indian restaurant and ordered the lassi. Was he ever disappointed when the waiter brought him a yogurt drink!

And Instapundit... just go over there and scroll. It's brimming with Obama-eats-dog nuggets. Like this link to "Dogs Against Obama" — which corresponds to the much promoted "Dogs Against Romney."

My preference would be for everyone to stop talking about the dog stories, but that's not how speech works. No one notices that some speakers are refraining from speaking. In a free-speech marketplace of ideas, you've got to provide more speech. You might say, well, let's be high-minded about this and say things like: Let's avoid distractions and discuss things that really matter, like the economy. But that won't drive the Seamus story away. You've got to offer an equivalent product in the marketplace of ideas, and Obama-eats-dog is that product.

ADDED: The Obama-eats-dog meme makes jokes — especially visual humor — incredibly easy. Everybody's suddenly a photoshop comic genius with stuff like this:



You can scream for mercy now, but the cat is out of the bag the dog is out of the strapped-to-the-top-of-the-car kennel.

"Dog Wars Escalate: Barack Obama Ate Dog Meat."

Oh, my. The war on women wasn't titillating enough. Now, it's the war on dogs.

What's the worse atrocity in the war on dogs?
	A dog carrier on top of a car, which the dog seemed to like, but one time it pooped copiously.
	Eating dog meat, when you were served it by your step-dad, in a country where it was normal food.
	The closest thing to an atrocity here is portraying any of this as atrocious.
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