Kamala Harris is "bluntly putting down markers on nuanced topics to help inoculate her from false critiques with answers that also illuminate how she views her own identity."

That's from Politico, "Why Kamala Harris is glad people are asking if she's black enough/The candidate is looking to head off a problem that dogged Barack Obama" by Christopher Cadelago.

First, I don't believe that Politico knows that Harris is "glad." Also, I wouldn't use the word "dogged" with Barack Obama, given that he was dogged with the question of the literal eating of dogs.

But what I want to do is count the metaphors in the quote I put in the title:

1. bluntly — The adjective leads us to think we'll be referring to something that could be sharpened — like a weapon or a pencil — but in this case is not.

2. putting down markers — "A marker, to a gambler, is an I.O.U. ... The gambler's definition of marker as 'promissory note'' appeared first in 1887, but was popularized in Damon Runyon's 'Guys and Dolls'' in 1932: 'Now I am going to pay my landlady, and take up a few markers here and there, and feed myself up good.' A 1934 film based on a Runyon tale about a little girl used as an I.O.U. was titled 'Little Miss Marker.''' Wrote William Safire, a while back, in the NYT. (Here's the film clip with Shirley Temple as an IOU in human form.)

3. nuanced — "Nuance" comes from words that mean cloud. We're talking about subtlety in shading. How could you in an unsharp way put an IOU on a cloud?

4. inoculate — To inoculate is to engraft or implant. The "ocu" part actually means "eye," because it was a plant eye that was engrafted. We now have to think of the IOU as something that, engrafted into a cloud, is like the germs put into the human body to produce immunity from the disease that would be caused by those germs if the body had encountered them in some other way. The disease in this image is "false critiques," and the immunity is "answers." This is the one metaphor the writer probably thought about consciously. A good writer would notice that this is the central, useful metaphor and edited out any hint of a metaphor that doesn't fit — including "dead metaphors" like "bluntly." (Here's George Orwell on dead metaphors.)

5. illuminate — Now, it's about giving light. The light source is the "answers," but, as we just saw, within the inoculation metaphor, the answers were immunity. Immunity resists disease. That's a good thing. Let the answers be good in that form. Don't change them into something else that you think is good. I like light, but you're annoying me with the task of picturing light along with sharpness, gambling, clouds, and inoculation.

In short, don't mix metaphors. And I miss William Safire. I should read a lot of his old columns and get some ideas about how to write the kinds of things I'd like to be able to just read, but he's not there anymore to write them for me.

"You do love your dogs, don't you? I wouldn't mind having one honestly, but I don't have time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?"

Trump, in El Paso, last night.

"Would that be [makes a face] — right? — sort of not — right? I don't feel good. Feels a little phony — phony to me. People say, Oh, you should get a dog. Why? It's good politically. I said, That's not the relationship I have with my people."

Trump muses about having a dog at the White House, but concludes "it feels a little phony to me."

"That's not the relationship I have with my people... Obama had a dog." pic.twitter.com/xZTuMozOYk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 12, 2019

Someone in the crowd calls out "Obama!" Trump points at him, laughs, and says, "Yeah, Obama had a dog, you're right."

Perhaps the man in the crowd wanted Trump to riff on Obama's childhood acceptance of eating dog meat in Indonesia, but Trump only spoke of the dog Obama acquired as he entered the White House. Obama's dog acquisition really did seem to be a political move, and Trump could have gone on about the phoniness of Obama's dog specifically, but he moved on to another subject. He'd already made his point that White House dogs seem phony and acknowledged — I'm reading his face-making — that in his case walking around with a dog would look especially phony.

When I was listening to the speech last night, when Trump said "That's not the relationship I have with my...," I thought he was going to talk about relationships with pets and say something about not getting a pet that you are not committed to spending time with and treating as a fellow sentient creature. That's one reason not to get a pet.

But he said "That's not the relationship I have with my people." For a second, I thought he was calling dogs "people," then I realized he was going to a completely different place. He wasn't talking about what dogs deserve. He was criticizing the politicians who get dogs to influence how human beings think about them. It's phony. It's manipulation. And Trump doesn't do that.

We could talk about what Trump does do and whether any of it is phony, but, whatever, he doesn't do it with dogs. And maybe he only refrains from using a dog as a political prop because it just wouldn't work for him. It would just look wrong for him to walk around with a dog. That seems to be what he's thinking about as he makes those faces and gestures. GWB and Obama looked pretty sweet walking with their dogs. Trump is a showman, but that means he knows what shows to put on. And maybe he is just being himself, doing what comes from his true core, whatever that is. It's hard to think of his self-presentation as natural and purely self-expressive, but maybe in some weird way, it is.

This discussion makes me think of the old Coco Chanel aphorism: "Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve."

Nature didn't make his hair go like that or turn his skin orange. There's some unnatural stuff going on, but — at least theoretically — those things express the man. And that is what Chanel meant, that what you look like when you are old is what came from the inside.

The heads of Drudge, eating iguana, and the evidentiary value of a DNA test.

On Drudge, just now:



I don't really know what Drudge is trying to say, but the women — Ivanka and Elizabeth Warren — both have bands around their heads (I know Ivanka's is an entire hat) and the men's heads are more differentiated:

1. Musk's head is enclosed within a space helmet, 2. Bezo displays baldness glossily, 3. Eminem, like a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, has his noggin inside a baseball cap wrapped in a hoodie.

I was going to discuss Elizabeth Warren's crudely photoshopped "Indian" headband (and arrows), but I took a moment to click to see what Jeff Bezos has on that tray, and it's the entire body of a cooked iguana and he's posing seemingly eating a chunk of it!

From the text of "Bezos Says He’ll Spend ‘Amazon Lottery Winnings’ on Space Travel"(Bloomberg):

The Amazon chief executive officer wasn’t the only billionaire at the glitzy event at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square. West Coast industrial real estate tycoon Ed Roski and Frederik Paulsen, a Swedish pharmaceutical titan and pole explorer, perused the tarantula, cockroach and roasted iguana appetizers amid 1,200 guests including James Lovell, the first person to journey twice to the moon, on Apollo 8 and Apollo 13.

Boldface added. Eat what you're told! I was introduced to dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy)...

But, okay, here's the Elizabeth Warren article Drudge links to: "Elizabeth Warren refuses DNA test to prove Native American heritage." There's no "Indian" paraphernalia in the photo there (at the New York Post). I think it's grotesque and irrelevant to demand a DNA test.

"Many Indonesians who are still too poor to eat beef, except on special occasions, can now afford dog or cat."

Said one animal protection researcher quoted in "Indonesians’ Taste for Dog Meat Is Growing, Even as Others Shun It" (NYT).

“From a strictly practical, agricultural point of view, growing dogs and cats for meat requires far less space and feed resources than growing cows, and is therefore cheaper,” [Brad] Anthony said. “The economics of it all is likely the primary motivator for production and consumption.”...

[D]ogs are not classified as livestock, the way cows, pigs and chickens are. Because of this, the slaughter, distribution, sale and consumption of dogs are not regulated.... In Jakarta, Juniatur Silitonga... says he slaughters about 20 dogs in an average week....

“It’s cheaper than beef,” he said. “Eating dog meat is a tradition among local tribes, and they are mostly Christian, but Muslims also eat dog meat soup for medicinal reasons.”

There is a belief that meat from a black dog cures asthma.

ADDED: In the comments — those swamps of vitriol and condescension — they're making a beeline for Obama-eats-dog material. Here's my Obama eats dog tag to beef up — dog up — your witticisms.

But what I really want to talk about is poverty and human health. If dogs and cats are cheap and easy to breed and keep, why shouldn't poor people be accorded respect as they embrace this form of food production? The article doesn't really approach this problem, but immediately distracts us with 2 completely different problems: 1. Cruel methods of slaughter, and 2. Rabies.

These are utterly easy to see as problems. There's no debate about ethics, so it's a fine distraction from the harder question I want to talk about.

And aren't these problems solvable? Can't poor people be educated about and convinced to use the most humane method of slaughter? We affluent people — most of us — don't deny ourselves meat because of the suffering of animals. We just expect that the suffering to be decently minimized.

As for rabies, nobody wants rabies! Let's work on that problem everywhere. According to the article, unregulated commerce makes it hard to rabies, which is "a persistent problem in Bali and elsewhere." If this is a reason to deny a meat source to poor people, please explain to me why affluent people are encouraged to travel to Bali. Here's a NYT article from 2015: "Rabies Deaths Higher Than Previously Thought":

Rabies kills 59,000 people a year, or about 160 a day — more than had previously been assumed — according to a study published last week.

That is a terrible problem. Worry about that, not whether some poor people are taking advantage of the profusion of dogs and cats to get some meat in their diet.

Obama tags on this blog that have collected a surprising number of posts.

You can see all my Obama tags below the fold. I'll just list some I particularly like for various reasons — odd specificity, surprising usefulness, whatever:

Obama the mood elevator (74)
Obama the boyfriend (58)
Obama and manliness (24)
Obama's psyche (68)
Obama is everywhere (15)
Obama and irony (14)
Obama and pop culture (87)
Obama the father (19)
Obama the teacher (28)
Obama and the fly (13) (Let's see Trump catch a fly with his bare hand.)
Obama eats dog (12)
Obama attacked from the left (11)
Obama gets mad (3)
Obama is bland ( 63)
Obama's tired (5)
Obama is like Bush (78)
Obama is like Carter (15)
Obama is like Nixon (35)
Obama is like Reagan (4)
Obama is like Sarah Palin (4)
Obama's umbrella (5)
Obama says something strange (1)

Question: "Why is Barack Obama drinking beer at 11am?"

Answer: He's in Bavaria, acting Bavarian.

Angela Merkel... treated him to a full Bavarian breakfast of white sausages, pretzels and foaming lager... Bavarians don’t down a quick pint before heading to the office every morning. It originates in Frühschoppen — a local tradition of meeting for a drink late in the morning on Sundays and holidays. According to Bavarian custom, the sausages cannot be eaten after 12 noon, because no preservatives are used and they are made fresh every day. Therefore those who wish to wash their sausages down with a beer must get supping before that time. The local saying is that the sausages must not be allowed to hear the church bells chime noon.

I have too many Obama tags already and it's too late in The Story of Barack Obama to make an "Obama eats food" tag, so I'm just going with the closest thing I've got. It begins with "Obama eats..." anyway. Too bad I don't have "Obama drinks beer." There was that famous "beer summit" that maybe half of the people have forgotten by now. That would have been the time to create an "Obama drinks beer" tag. So I'm going with "Obama and drugs." Close enough, no?

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.

"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."

"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.

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,

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.
pollcode.com free polls