Flip and Woody.....

Here is Flip Romney in New Hampshire today.

This is New Hampshire of the “Live Free or Die” license plate.

And…..let it be said that I am not anti-Mormon. I love Mormons……especially Mormon women, truth be told. I revere Mormon women. Even Amanda once had a Temple Invite. I am just anti-hypocrite. I still have not met a hypocritical Mormon woman. Sorry, Mitt. YOU are the starter husband, you dumb fuck. Wait till your chick meets some guy with principles and a ball sack.

Anyway, here is Mitt:

“Hillary Clinton’s course: Let government manage your life. Our course: Let the individual and personal responsibility lead and guide,” Romney said. “She said we have been an ‘on-your-own society’ and she says we need to replace that with shared responsibility and ‘working together society.’ That’s out with (free-market pioneer) Adam Smith and in with Karl Marx.”

Well……individual and personal responsibility used to work.

I am still that guy: Jack Armstrong…..work hard, do the right thing, help your fellow man….and everything will be fine. Everyone take care of your own world to the best of your abilities…..and everyone will prosper.

Etienne Merle taught me that in a successful restaurant there are no problems…..everyone works their hardest and there is so much money to spread around at the end of the night that the nickels and dimes don’t matter. We always had the happiest dishwashers on the planet. (Wait! I was one of those dishwashers! Oh...and Merle used to fuck us out of the FICA on the employee meals.....I got a check for $13.85 from the New York State Department of Labor after five years....I consider it my diploma.)

But....you get the picture. Merle inspired us and filled our hearts with the joy of a hard job well done..... And set us all on career paths that seem to basically be the culinary version of Muslim suicide bombers....

Merle’s other lesson was that in your spare time and with your spare money……help out the next guy. You never know if the guy you step on on your way up won’t be there to chuckle at you on your way down, should you slip up. And that guy you give the hand up at the right time…..could be the next Horatio Alger. And you will all smoke cigars at your daughter’s wedding and laugh about the old times……

Momie Hilde had the same lesson for me. At her restaurant in Berlin in 1945, she used to feed a cute young couple at the back door by the trash every day. (This is why she was called Momie….and we all preserved her misspelling of the core word for decades). She stole eftover stock and soup and stale bread from her own place. Years later, after Brazil, and New York, and Philly, and Minnesota she moved to Monterey and had a series of successful restaurants, with even Clint as a partner in The Marquis.

Damned if she didn’t run into the couple again: Peter Steuber, now (at this time) the manager of the Mark Thomas Inn (now the Hyatt) and very fancy. They cut her dead, and pretended not to know her. We always laughed at the irony….especially as the hotel sold, his marriage dissolved, then there was the expensive illegitimate child, the failed restaurants (anyone remember Latitude 36….or his crappy German place on Junipero where the gay Mexican restaurant used to be?....and Judith Profeta is still trying to peddle.....)

Yeah, well…..that just proves that I am old to think like this. That honesty and hard work should matter.

And genuine charity, for it's own sake.

I hope to God that Romney gets run out of New Hampshire. Live Free or Die, indeed. Fuck this guy...with his Irish Setter on the roof. Remember: I am campaigning for the New Republican Party…..and New Hampshire is almost Margaret Chase Smith country. I guess I am actually campaigning for the OLD Republican Party….when the kind of values that Flip Romney gives lip service to actually existed in the business world.

Now, our lead Republican.... and the National Leader...... is blatantly and in-your-face-fuck-you campaigning on a platform of lies, corruption, nepotism and perversion of every possible original American concept and value. Madison, Jefferson and Hamilton used to fight like cats and dogs....Today they would all line up for a chance to shoot this current idiot on the New Jersey Palisades....and Aaron Burr would be there with them.

A cool businessman nowadays cuts his wages to the level that his workers need Medi-Cal and welfare…….and then runs even those jobs out to the Chinese while he buys a third house in Boca Raton. He takes full advantage of the absence of moral, ethical and government oversight to steal, pollute and destroy anything he can to make a temporary dollar for his stockholders....and then even hijacks THEM for Caligula-style wages and excess…..

Even, or especially..... at the cost of the degradation of the National Discourse. Forget the National Life-Style.

Oh, and Flip......Mr. Romney.....what part of individual and personal responsibility is it when you have to listen to my phone calls, read my emails, and dump eight hundred year old legal principles like habeus corpus?

Oh, and Your Leader's latest Presidential Order? You can seize me and all my assets if you deem me to be a threat to your policies in Iraq. What part of me is not a threat to the current policies in Iraq? So...where do I report, and who is gonna cook Monday Night dinner?

These guys are pissing in their own well. OUR well. MY fucking well.....

Lead article in the New York Times Magazine today: the most successful restaurant in America is some piece of shit colossus in Las Vegas…Tao? Something. Sixty million dollars a year…..a huge lead over Number Two: my old workplace The Tavern on The Green in Central Park….(where I had to carry an ice-hook around to keep the Puerto Rican cooks from stealing my Uncle Ben’s Rice coupons…another story.) Tao? Something also has a place in New York City that takes in another twenty mill or so.

The first paragraph talks about how Americans are so in love with Tao? that they line up to eat Chilean Sea Bass satays…..

Fuck me silly. Chilean Sea Bass? I just finished writing Time Magazine a scorcher about their puff piece on Singapore Airlines where the supposedly fabulous Kraut chef serves wonderful gourmet meals like BBQ pork ribs and CHILEAN SEA BASS! What.....are these prop planes these guys are flying? DC-6B Constellations with chicks with girdles as "stewardesses"?

Has anyone noticed that no conscientious American chef has served Chilean Sea Bass since Bill Clinton spluged on Monica’s blue dress? These are giant, old fish….eating them is like chowing down on a Galapagos turtle. Everyone knows this…….don’t they? Doesn't the New York Times? Or does the sixty mill volume push back the obvious fucked-upness of this circus shithole packed full of rubes?

What have we come to?

I was not kidding when I posted: “Your Government is Trying to Kill You.” Flip Romney has his whole thing backwards.....and as the Human Golden Retriever in the race he is too busy panting after His Master's Milkbone to notice. Your government IS trying to kill you...they just don't want Osama to beat them. (Did you ever notice that your Blue Cross policy, your business liability policy and your homeowner's policy EXCLUDE acts of terrorism...or acts of God (see: Allah....) And have since.....oh, the Gulf of Tonkin incident?)

At least Cheney and his crew are viciously and cynically exploiting old doddering Marshall McLuan. They can convince the MSM that the DEMOCRATS are obstructing passage of the military funding bill……when it is the Republican Masada suicidal fringe that are filibustering the bill…..against all their own declared principles of just two years ago. Flip is so fucking stupid he has missed the point.

The USDA has pillaged a Republican American company from the reddest county in the reddest state in The Union for having too high standards for inspecting beef. The same USDA and FDA are closing inspection stations and firing scientists to save money and eliminate oversight of the most basic sanitary and health standards....even for food from China and Nicaragua……to the point of rolling standards back to the days of “The Jungle” by Upton Sinclair. The same outfits have gutted organic standards to the point of meaningless absurdity.

In the modern Republican businessplace the core value is not independence to do good, to create a great product in a happy peaceful, sustainable environment, free from stodgy, unenlightened government interference....a product that will raise the business milieu and give us all cause to smoke cigars at our daughters' wedddings.

The new core value is: Get the fuck out of my hair so I can screw the fourteen year old busgirls, not pay them overtime or minimum, get their Mom's on welfare and Planned Parenthood, sell turkey as veal piccatta, toxic farmed salmon as wild-caught, and hire illegal aliens to parrot real skills of real chefs .....and who live in the back of the shop in a car by the dumpster.

Like Peter Steuber in Berlin. In a bombed-out Fascist failure of a city.

The only reason Karl Marx ever had an audience to begin with, Flip...... was because of people like you, Flip Romney….the other dumb fucks…..AND the vicious, short-sighted pricks like Bush and Cheney.

Someone find me a Republican with a set of morals, a sustainable business and a something palpable in the ballsack……

Please.

Amanda is now on a John Steinbeck kick. He is very cool now….with his museum and shit in Salinas, and everyone reading his books....even in schools....even in Kansas.

Ag people in Salinas still hate him..... the way old-school Republicans still won’t drink Dewar’s scotch because Old Man Kennedy made the family pot importing the stuff during and after Prohibition. People forget that those old school Republicans were basically right….the guy was a fucking radical progressive with an overdeveloped fascination and love of the workers and common folk…a traitor to his class. Friends with Ansel Adams. Friends with Woody Guthrie.

Well, Steinbeck is everywhere today. (Even in my house. We have temporary possession of Hilario….a photo of a vaquero that Carol Steinbeck bought at a garage sale in 1940….blessed upon us by my godfather, Bill Brown…..Carol’s second husband. Hilario is complete with Carol’s lipstick print on his cheek….she loved the guy).

In closing, here is another super-patriotic mind twister for you. I await the moment when Flip Romney or some other hypocritical fuckhead adopts “This Land is Your Land” as his campaign song.

(I agree with Flip’s attack on Hillary….but only on musical principles…..I mean: Celine Dion?)

Here are the words to the song, as Woody Guthrie wrote them, and the Bad Republicans and every kindergarten class in America sings them:

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

I, as a born and bred honest-to-God Republican (Margaret Chase Smith style), crossed with Irish union Democrats….and for some reason, I always remember the next verse:

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

Flip…..get rid of these lying, cheating cocksuckers so that the rest of us can actually……

Live Free or Die……