The Dish

Move over, Top Chef. The recipe is a result of research into pre-historic British diets:

Researchers wanted to compile a list of favorite foods that sustained our forebears and their influence on modern-day menus.

Top of the pot came nettle pudding, which was traced back 8,000 years.

Close behind were smokey stew, a combination of bacon and smoked fish; then a mixture of offal, fat and herbs called meat pudding followed by barley bread and roast hedgehog.

Stinging nettles, which remain in plentiful supply today, are still used in puddings, soup, tea, porridge and beer.

Yum.

Mailer explains his long beef with Podhoretz – and, somewhat hilariously, takes responsibility for Podhoretz’s journey to the far right fringe :

Interviewer:  But let us talk about neoconservatism.  It has become such a thing in America.  I’m interested in your relationship with people like Norman Podhoretz, people who went on a journey that took them very far from the place where they started.

Mailer: Well, I can understand it.  And in fact, I feel partly responsible for Podhoretz.  He and I were close friends at one point.  He wrote a book called Making It, and the book got trashed terribly.  He was unpopular on the left.  I never quite understood why he was so unpopular.  But they trashed his book like you wouldn’t believe.  It was truly ugly.  And I hadn’t read it yet – or I’d read the first half of it, which was pretty good.  And I witnessed this trashing and said to him, I’m going to write a review.  So I read all of the book.  And the book betrays itself.  The second half is god-awful.

  In the first half, his thesis is that the dirty little secret among the left, among artists and intellectuals, is that they really want to make it, and they want to make it big.  And they conceal that from themselves and from others.  But this is really the motivating factor that is never talked about.  You can talk about sex but you can’t talk about ambition and desire for success.  So he does all that. And then he starts to give portraits of all the people on the left who have made it – pious, sweet little portraits, with people who we know goddamn well are not that at all.  And I was horrified at the way he could betray his own book.  There was a failure in nerve there – in other words, if you want to be strong theoretically, you better be strong in detail as well.  That’s what makes a good general.  Strong at both ends.  And he wasn’t.

So I ended up mocking his book, too.  And I was pretty cruel.  Looking back on it, I was probably too cruel.  He went into a depression and stayed there for about a year… just didn’t do much.  Worked on his magazine and listened to music and hardly saw anyone.  And by the end of that time, he’d moved over to the right.  Podhoretz is nothing if not active and enterprising.  So the moment he moved over to the right, it wasn’t enough to be on the right, he had to be far to the right.  And so I feel that I’m responsible, to whatever degree, for helping to have shoved him over there.  Which is too bad, because he now is paying for his sins on the right by having supported the war in Iraq and he has to live with it – he has to live with all the idiocies of the neoconservatives.

Comparing reviews. Heh.

Organic food isn’t better for you.

I await the right-wing blogosphere’s description of Alan Greenspan as a convert to leftism because he has recognized the fiscal policies of Bush and Cheney for what they are and were. The arguments made in my book, The Conservative Soul, have not gone away. It is good to see more and more fiscal conservatives prepared to say how far astray the GOP has wandered. I guess it’s a little too much to ask that they might have said it at a time when it could have made, you know, a difference.

No official statement but a leak to ABC News. Bush still claims and, thanks to Congress, still has the legislative power to torture anyone he deems an "enemy combatant".

I have a feeling more Republicans think this in private than said so in public:

Some have drawn a contrast between the sobriety of tone of Petraeus and Crocker and the perhaps over-positive tone of the president’s remarks. The trouble was, if the president were to speak at all, he had no alternative to this tone … which may suggest that he ought to have waited until the first signs of success in Anbar have been confirmed as something larger and more permanent. 

Compared with the larger picture, the domestic partisan repercussions of the president’s decision to up the bet in his dollar auction in Iraq are trivial. But it doesn’t make a huge amount of sense for an American political party to bind itself to a war it obviously cannot control. If the current predictions turn sour, the verdict on the Republicans and their reflexive deference to a clearly overwhelmed war-president may be severe.

Ottawa, Canada, 3.14 pm.

Steve Benen looks at the Democratic race and is puzzled. Alex Whalen isn’t.