Big Bird Day

Our standard Thanksgiving routine includes a morning perambulation of at least a couple lazy miles, theoretically at least in the original concept helping with the appetite (or something), I guess. As we all get older (lazier), in lieu of shortening the amble, the start time has tended to slide just a tad (not to mention the average pace). This year we met up nominally at 10:30, leaving me time to pull off bacon, scramble, and potatoes for five (Mara and Sean had heroically pulled in around about 1:00AM following evening work - and some of us stayed up to greet them).

The walk came off without a hitch, actually better than in many years thanks to lack of rain. It was quite breezy though, and I regretted that all I had for torso was shortsleeve poly covered with longsleeve cotton (the former originally intended as survival gear - it filled the role, but barely - it's never a good sign when you are survival-garbed at the start of a project). Heading south along the waterfront into the wind was a little marginal.

My god-daughter and neice Kirsten had her board along and picked up on my suggestion that she hitch up a dog. Allie (net weight 22 lbs!) was initially pressed into service, which she ably provided for a while, though only to the tune of keeping up with us amblers. Re-hitch to Mr. 'stotle totally changed the program. K quickly smoked us, being out of sight in a few minutes and returning eventually after high-speed pull (Ari net 45+ lbs?), when we were only two-thirds of the way to the turnaround. He seemed unfazed.

A couple hours later we reassembled in West Seattle (formerly aka Alki, or New York Bye-and-Bye, also fictionally within a quick paddle of Lake Union via "Sleepless") to gabble, tell lies, re-tell stories, and otherwise endear ourselves to each other like some sort of goose-gaggle. Mara and Sean had assembled what seemed enough Devilled Eggs to satisfy a decent throng. Marg had prepped Brussels Sprouts on my behalf. Eric had presumably done the necessary ligament stretching and mind-origami for his gravy-guru role.

Present on the day itself, as my feeble gray has it, were four grandparents, seven of the next generation, and five from generation three. It was notable and appreciated to have my parents present - they have commonly traveled to Southern California to visit my sister Ann by this time. Excellent to have them join us. Not to mention four hounds and a brand-new-to-the-house cat, who was more or less under wraps due to all of the above.

Well, actually, besides the stories and bad jokes and all, we were there to cook, imbibe, and finally fall face down on more food than is seemly.

It's a blessing. In ever so many ways.

I didn't manage quite the intensity of photo coverage I sometimes am able to pull off and would have liked to. I find myself recently designated as the default bar-man, a role I struggle with even when on home turf, since I tend to also often find myself slotted in for a bit or two of cooking. I can't help but remark on, if not envy William Powell's schtick (we've been watching the occasional Thin Man); he certainly tends the liquour with gusto and far more brio and splash than I can ever muster (he somehow has a far more maleable clientele), never missing a chance to offer up a drink while keeping his own glass full, but then food preparation is done by magic in his movie-life. And, for that matter, much of his bar-work seems to be done by the "help." I dunno - maybe he's expected to be ever-alert for clues. I should probably check the fine print in my contract.

Working the bar, in case you have not had the experience, can be a very engrossing task at someone else's house, e.g., when it comes to tracking down mixers, add-ons, and working out alternatives with the "clients." Par example, no properly-chilled white wine was to hand at happy hour on this occasion, not something the conscripted brewmeister can remedy quickly.

And then there are the other responsibilities that compete with camera work, i.e., negotiating for Home on the Range for B. Sprouts and Bok Choy.

But we made do.

I did get a few cameos.

Mara worked up her own creative takeoff on a Waldorf salad.

Kirsten did some wonderful magic with the sweet potatoes, no photo coverage available alas, as we were sweating side-by-side at the time.

Sean, the savvy-one with sharp scimitar worked over the Big Bird.

And Eric broke new ground with a roux-gravy that might have been the best ever.

It cannot be denied that there is perhaps an element of over-the-top in this meal, with dishes that readily come to mind this year (bypassing the hors d'oeurves and dessert - and forgive me for what I forgot) including:

Da Bird (23 lbs)

oh, the dressing, I can never get enough

mashers (Chad's favorite - if only he could have been present!)

sweet potatoes

green bean casserole

creamed onions

gravy(!)

Waldorf salad
Brussel's sprouts

bok choy

devilled eggs

home-made rolls

Ye gods, what a lot of food! Looking back, there are several dishes I missed even sampling (certainly not gravy-maestro Eric's masterpiece!).

That's more or less how we do it. I.e., the dinner course. The pre- and post-, well, if need be we can get back to that later.

Of course for all of us, it's a highlight of the year to have the chance to have so many loved ones together and savor so much scrumptious food.

We were lucky enough to catch the tail-end of "Alice's Restaurant" on the radio after morning constitutional. I was amused to read on line later in the weekend a post indicating that their family (well, it's probably only dad, I'm betting, and one deranged one at that) has a tradition of following Alice up with a play of the Chipmunks' "Please Christmas Don't Be Late." Oikks.

A Time for Cleansing

Perhaps in the spirit of balancing potential cheery mindset vis-a-vis prior post, let us not fail to attend to the incredible effort being made by the Big Losers of 2008 to redact history, much as the rare bit of paper that got out of the current maladministration featured so much black-out.

Let's start off with a little Digby, debunking the attempt to paint poppy as warm, sort-of-Santa-like, and certainly with a record that grows more golden and flawless by the day (a la Ronnie?). Their attempt is to provide a lot more cover and latitude for those Obama appointees who still reek of their time working in the stables of bush (i and ii) to ride into office with little or no skeptical questioning or intent scrutiny, something that would obviously be a huge lapse on our part:

I'm not too sure where E.J.Dionne is coming from here, but it sounds as if he thinks it's some kind of great thing if Obama decides to become the president son George Bush Sr never had. But it pays to remember that the vaunted "realism" of George Bush Sr led to a war that's still going on today. He's the guy who got us caught up in Iraq and he did it in ways that his decidedly unrealistic son took to heart. The propaganda, for instance:

Take the Kuwaiti babies story. Its origins go back to the first world war when British propaganda accused the Germans of tossing Belgian babies into the air and catching them on their bayonets. Dusted off and updated for the Gulf war, this version had Iraqi soldiers bursting into a modern Kuwaiti hospital, finding the premature babies ward and then tossing the babies out of incubators so that the incubators could be sent back to Iraq.

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It was not until nearly two years later that the truth emerged. The story was a fabrication and a myth, and Nayirah, the teenage Kuwaiti girl, coached and rehearsed by Hill & Knowlton for her appearance before the Congressional Committee, was in fact the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. By the time Macarthur revealed this, the war was won and over and it did not matter any more.

That was, of course, the least of it:

ABC News Nightline opened last June 9 with words to make the heart stop. "It is becoming increasingly clear," said a grave Ted Koppel, "that George Bush, operating largely behind the scenes throughout the 1980s, initiated and supported much of the financing, intelligence, and military help that built Saddam's Iraq into the aggressive power that the United States ultimately had to destroy."

Is this accurate? Just about every reporter following the story thinks so. Most say that the so-called Iraqgate scandal is far more significant then either Watergate or Iran-contra, both in its scope and its consequences. And all believe that, with investigations continuing, it is bound to get bigger.

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Iraqgate was another of those scandals that Clinton and the Democrats in congress left on the floor because they didn't want to play the blame game. It's ended up costing a lot of lives.

I recognize that in the beltway, there is a belief that the only "serious" foreign policy schools are Neoconservative and Realist (also conservative.) We know that Obama is not a neocon and it's a great relief. But let's hope that Obama is forging a different path than that taken by the Realists as well. After all, the king of the realists is none other than Henry Kissinger and he's left his fingerprints on every American made foreign disaster in the last 40 years.

I suppose that if it makes the villagers happy to believe that the really, really old "grown-ups" are back in charge, it doesn't matter a whole lot if it's just a PR stunt. But let's hope that people in foreign lands don't get the idea that we're taking a trip back to the 80s because that wasn't a particularly successful time for American foreign policy.

And revisionists who are trying to turn Poppy into some kind of kindly, avuncular old coot need to take a little trip down memory lane. He was a ruthless piece of work.

And then there is this longer-ranging and possibly even more important take on the repub/conservative mindset over the past oh, say, six decades, courtesy of Neil Gabler at the LA Times (h/t Josh at TPM):

Ever since the election, partisans within the Republican Party and observers outside it have been speculating wildly about what direction the GOP will take to revive itself from its disaster. Or, more specifically, which wing of the party will prevail in setting the new Republican course -- whether it will be what conservative writer Kathleen Parker has called the "evangelical, right-wing, oogedy-boogedy" branch or the more pragmatic, intellectual, centrist branch. To determine the answer, it helps to understand exactly how Republicans arrived at this spot in the first place.

The creation myth of modern conservatism usually begins with Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the party's presidential standard-bearer in 1964 and who, even though he lost in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history, nevertheless wrested the party from its Eastern establishment wing. Then, Richard Nixon co-opted conservatism, talking like a conservative while governing like a moderate, and drawing the opprobrium of true believers. But Ronald Reagan embraced it wholeheartedly, becoming the patron saint of conservatism and making it the dominant ideology in the country. George W. Bush picked up Reagan's fallen standard and "conservatized" government even more thoroughly than Reagan had, cheering conservatives until his presidency came crashing down around him. That's how the story goes.

But there is another rendition of the story of modern conservatism, one that doesn't begin with Goldwater and doesn't celebrate his libertarian orientation. It is a less heroic story, and one that may go a much longer way toward really explaining the Republican Party's past electoral fortunes and its future. In this tale, the real father of modern Republicanism is Sen. Joe McCarthy, and the line doesn't run from Goldwater to Reagan to George W. Bush; it runs from McCarthy to Nixon to Bush and possibly now to Sarah Palin. It centralizes what one might call the McCarthy gene, something deep in the DNA of the Republican Party that determines how Republicans run for office, and because it is genetic, it isn't likely to be expunged any time soon.

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McCarthy, a Catholic, was especially adept at nursing national resentments among the sorts of people that typically did not vote Republican. He stumbled onto the fact that many of these people in postwar America were frightened and looking for scapegoats. He provided them, and in doing so not only won millions of adherents but also bequeathed to his party a powerful electoral bludgeon that would eventually drive out the moderates from the GOP (posthumous payback) before it drove the Democrats from the White House.

In a way, Goldwater was less a fulfillment of McCarthy conservatism than a slight diversion from it. Goldwater was ideological -- an economic individualist. He hated government more than he loved winning, and though he was certainly not above using the McCarthy appeal to resentment or accusing his opponents of socialism, he lacked McCarthy's blood- lust. McCarthy's real heir was Nixon, who mainstreamed McCarthyism in 1968 by substituting liberals, youth and minorities for communists and intellectuals, and fueling resentments as McCarthy had. In his 1972 reelection, playing relentlessly on those resentments, Nixon effectively disassembled the old Roosevelt coalition, peeling off Catholics, evangelicals and working-class Democrats, and changed American politics far more than Goldwater ever would.

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Republicans continue to push the idea that this is a center-right country and that Americans have swooned for GOP anti-government posturing all these years, but the real electoral bait has been anger, recrimination and scapegoating. That's why John McCain kept describing Barack Obama as some sort of alien and why Palin, taking a page right out of the McCarthy playbook, kept pushing Obama's relationship with onetime radical William Ayers.

And that is also why the Republican Party, despite the recent failure of McCarthyism, is likely to keep moving rightward, appeasing its more extreme elements and stoking their grievances for some time to come. There may be assorted intellectuals and ideologues in the party, maybe even a few centrists, but there is no longer an intellectual or even ideological wing. The party belongs to McCarthy and his heirs -- Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and Palin. It's in the genes.

The primary point is that while we have forestalled the ghastly prospect of awakening to an administration involving McCain and Palin (oh the horror - the horror!), there is truly no time for complacency. It's somewhat of a minor dream come true to have coulter's jaws wired, but I'm sure she still has her keyboard, and it would take more silver bullets, iron stakes, and garlic bulbs than I possess to even take care of that one of so many misguided enemies of our country.

We as activist citizens will have to maintain vigilance and diligence in monitoring our government's attention to the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and resulting civil liberties. For starters, Obama's administration will have to cede a good deal of the power illegally usurped by the prior Executive branch to the Legislature and Judiciary.

And I think it long past time we got to working on some sort of motivational program to encourage Early Retirement by key executives in the White House. I suspect it would be worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the economy even in the shortest of terms to have gwb back cutting brush and reverting to early childhood a few weeks early. Can't we find a way to offer up a few paltry tens of millions, say, for an early holiday present to the American People (not to mention the rest of the afflicted throughout the world)?