Stop Me Before I Vote Again

... They're coming to get you. A kindly reader sent this link:

http://www.cakehead.com/archives/2007/10/british_restaur.html

Restaurant Reduces Carbon Footprint by Serving Local Squirrel

The Famous Wild Boar Hotel in North West England is serving up free grey squirrel pancakes to hungry diners.

The restaurant at Crook, near Windermere, in Cumbria, is giving diners the chance to try the canapes free of charge. The grey squirrels were caught in the hotel's 72-acre woodland grounds and have been prepared by head chef Marc Sanders.

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I have eaten squirrel, back in my hardscrabble Southern childhood. It's not bad, especially with a lot of pepper. It's a little stringy and the flesh-to-bone ratio is low, even worse than bunny-rabbit and almost as bad as pigeon, but perhaps if there were some nice Muscular Squirrels(*) in the pot....

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(*) At the risk of spoiling an in-joke, newcomers might want to investigate the topic of Muscular Squirrels.

It's funny, sometimes you can really tell, just from the look on a guy's face, that he's crazy as a bedbug. I always found Stan McChrystal an easy diagnosis that way.

Everybody by now has read the Rolling Stone piece -- which is an enviably good read, I must say. My favorite bit:

"I'd rather have my ass kicked by a roomful of people than go out to this dinner," McChrystal says.

He pauses a beat.

"Unfortunately," he adds, "no one in this room could do it."

Let the record show this is a 55-year-old senior manager in a large corporation, talking in a way that would embarrass an 18-year-old frat boy. What a weird strange world the US military must have become, staffed in large part by serious cases of arrested development.

It's been pretty strange for quite a while, of course. The obvious comparison to McChrystal is Douglas MacArthur. First time as farce, second time as... as... what's downstream from farce? Sitcom, that's it. Sitcom. It even sounds like soldierspeak: SECDEF, CENTCOM, POTUS, SITCOM. Starring Bill Cosby as the President. Here's Dougie:

There was something so lovably naif about image-making in those days, wasn't there?

The interesting question, of course, is this: If any fool can plainly see, just from a picture in a newspaper, that Stan McChrystal was a first-class loon, how does it come about that Obie decided to make him Proconsul of Afghanistan in the first place?

Obie has placed a number of other obviously deranged individuals in positions of authority and emolument. One might mention, off the top of one's head, Larry "El Puerco" Summers, Arne "Dotheboys Hall" Duncan, and Hillary "Whatever Israel Wants" Cllinton. So the McChrystal appointment can't be dismissed as a fluke. We're looking at a pattern here. These are the people he wants -- perseverative Mad Hatters. His idea of a military commander is a gaunt hagridden insomniac stunted psychic dwarf, permanently damaged as only an alum of some "elite" regiment can be. His idea of a diplomat is Lady Macbeth. His idea of an educator is a man who should be managing a Chicago slaughterhouse. His idea of an economist is... Larry Summers.

McChrystal, so far, is the only one who's actually dropped trou and shat on the Oval Office carpet, however. Hmm. What do we make of that?

A fine old phrase, beloved by my hero Richard Nixon, creeps into mind here: "Crazy like a fox." I can't take credit for this hypothesis -- it floated across one of my lefty mailing lists:

I think it’s a brilliant move on McChrystal’s part. There’s no way he can achieve a real victory in Afghanistan. Why not play the tough guy, get himself fired, and when things fall apart strut about claiming that had he been allowed to run things victory will be assured.

The only thing I might object to in this otherwise brilliant insight is the slightly weaselly phrase "real victory". The Empire is not going to see any victory in Afghanistan, real, unreal, virtual, or even colorable. But my correspondent has grasped the essence of the matter: Stan didn't want to be holding the bag when the spooks start scrambling from the embassy roof for the last chopper out of Kabul.

I suspect Mad Stan will have the last laugh.

If you read a lot of blogs, you're likely to have come across a comment spammer called Coach Outlet Online. Rumor has it that Coach is actually Michael Ignatieff, cruise missile liberal, former Harvard professor in the cruise missile liberalism department and currently leader of Canada's Liberal Party, a position he uses to promote cruise missile liberalism.

One might easily assume he's a single issue kind of guy. But he's not. As the picture demonstrates, he likes to lecture people while grasping a pair of imaginary underpants. No one knows why he does it. He just does it, randomly, and gets upset when people fail to understand. The Liberal Party elevated him to the leadership because they were afraid of alienating people who support Stephen Harper, leader of the Seal Clubbing Party.