The Neocon Cookbook
Savory Recipes for the Power Hungry by the Power Elite
A Special Dispatch by Political Gourmand Zbigniew Zingh
www.dissidentvoice.org
August 6, 2005



 

These are the dog days of August, and the Bush Administration held its annual summer picnic and barbeque last week at the President's ranch in Crawford, Texas. The guests kicked off their shoes, loosened their ties, unbuttoned their brown shirts, forgot for the moment about world conflagrations, torture, extreme rendition, diseases, domestic and geopolitical intrigue, and gathered around for an all American cook-out.

As the Bush family led their guests in patriotic song and revelry and the roasting of marshmallows over a napalm fire-pit, the august gathering shared their favorite culinary recipes with the author.

W's Caesar Salad: According to the First Lady, this is her husband's favorite summer appetizer. A heaping bowl of perchlorate-laced lettuce tossed with an unfertilized raw egg, lemon juice, pork barrel bacon, campaign contribution vinaigrette, 100% virgin oil from Iraq, capers (from when W was ostensibly serving in the Texas Air National Guard), and a garnish of pretzels.

Karl Rove's Plame Pudding: Drop one CIA agent's identify and her husband's reputation into a bowl containing three sycophantic newspaper columnists, add artificially flavored yellow cake mix from Niger, whip into a froth, add a smidgeon of truth, a dollop of dissimulation, then spin in a blender on “high”; spin and spin and spin some more for several weeks. Leave unrefrigerated for a year until the gooey mess ferments and begins to stink. Then smear on unpatriotic people who do not faithfully support the Administration's line, making sure to lick your own fingers clean in the process.

John Bolton's Chopped Chicken Livers: Cut the livers out of every subordinate who isn't a kiss up, kick down kind of guy. Season with the flayed skin of Third World United Nations diplomats. Then chop them all up and mash them into a fine paste. Add unrelenting accusations of scandals, malfeasance and treason. Browbeat for months on end. Add minced onion and olives. Strain through mustache and eat for breakfast.

Grover Norquist's Bar-b-q-ed Liberal: First, pluck pinko liberals' constitutional feathers until they cannot fly. Then cut off their Bill of Rights and their access to the mainstream media. Then wring their necks. Tenderize by stomping with hobnailed jack boots. Rinse liberals' carcasses thoroughly in bathtub water, preferably the same bathtub water used to shrink and drown the federal government. After washing, place liberals on shish kebob skewers with GMO tomatoes and green pepper. Slowly cook elections, turning skewered liberals over electronic voting machines. Say Christian benediction and serve while steaming hot.

Alan Greenspan's Goldilocks Chocolate Fudge. Mix 45 billion dollars worth of illiquid assets with 2.4 trillion dollars in debt. Blend with a stick of partially hydrogenated margarine, one billion teaspoons of crushed derivatives and 3 ounces semi-sweet chocolate. Pour in six heaping barrels of treasury bonds purchased by foreign national banks. Add 4.7 trillion pounds of yeast and bicarbonate of soda to make fudge rise. Bring to a high heat. After bubbles form, beat several tens of millions of unemployed workers into oblivion and add to mix, stirring slowly with wooden ladle. Reduce interest rates. Increase money supply. Add both to mix simultaneously. Stimulate to taste. Pour into a cake mold and bake, slowly increasing temperature ¼ degree every 30 days. Mutter incomprehensible incantations while the fudge rises, overheats and then crashes. Dust with hog belly sprinkles and REIT options. Serve fudge when not too hot and not too cold and sell to credulous public at inflated prices.

Tom DeLay's Fried Chicken Wings: Pluck chickens. Tear off and discard all parts of chicken except for the right wing. Roll right wings in dough. Deep fry the chicken right wings in greasy cooking oil until the skin is brown and crispy. Place chicken right wings in a lobbying collection bucket and eat while flying off with lobbyists to exotic resorts. Charge lobbyists for the privilege of flying with you, talking with you and sharing your chicken wings with you. Discard chicken bones in poor and non-Republican voting districts in Texas. Using chicken bones as markers, redistrict Texas's poor and non-Republican voting districts into the Gulf of Mexico.

Pasta a la Berlusconi: In a large steel pot bring several gallons of water to a boil. Have American CIA kidnap, render, interrogate and soften up foreign guests, students, trade unionists and dissidents. Then beat foreigners, students, trade unionists and dissidents into thin strands of linguini. Toss the linguini into boiling water. Cook al dente. Season lightly with scandals and tomato paste.

Thomas Friedman's Lexus and Olive Oil Peasant Pizza: Evict third world peasants from their farm land. Mash third world peasants with pizza roller until you have a fine dough. Toss mashed peasants into the air and shape them into a pizza pie. Bake the peasant dough in the oven. Charge the peasants for the IMF and World Bank loans to purchase the oven, the electricity to run the oven, the dam to generate the electricity, the consulting fees to teach the peasants how to mash each other up into pizza dough, the infrastructure to market the peasant pizzas to the western world, plus 18% interest compounded daily. When baked, spread fine olive oil and garlic on pizza, purchasing both from abroad because the peasants' farmland has been replaced with duty-free maquiladoras to service Wal-Mart. Eat peasants. Drive off in your new Lexus bought with interest earned in the process of making peasant pizza.

Mike Johanns' USDA Baked Salmon Fillet: As the 28th Secretary of the Department of Agriculture, Mike Johanns offers this fabulous baked salmon recipe. First, find a fresh, wild salmon. Alright, so maybe there aren't anymore wild salmon. Well then, find a large albacore tuna, free of mercury. Hmmm, so where can you find mercury free tuna? Okay, let's try fillet of beef instead. Find a freshly slaughtered, BSE-free heifer and... okay, how about venison steak? Mad deer disease? Uh, okay, scrape some road kill off the highway and... what's this about MBTE? Say, how about going on a fast?

Dick Cheney's Deviled Eggs: Find several dozen good eggs and implement appropriate foreign policy to make them turn bad. The badder the better. Even when good eggs aren't bad, you can still use them to make deviled eggs. The best eggs used in Dick Cheney's Deviled Egg recipe come from Afghanistan, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Venezuela, France and anyplace else where people look, dress or talk “funny”. Demonize them. Excoriate them. Call them evil, Satan-worshiping, un-American, communists, Islamic extremists, whatever works to make Americans think that these “bad eggs” hate Americans for their life style. Spoon out whipped intolerance and ladle onto sliced egg halves. Season lightly with red, white and blue peppercorns and Holy Water. Break many more eggs than necessary to make the meal, the more broken eggs the better. Serve deviled eggs frequently, especially at election time and whenever poll numbers fall.

Jalal Talibani's Baghdad Baklava: Mix together six parts Shia fundamentalism, three parts Kurds, one part Sunni Baathist. Add liberal amounts of gunpowder, depleted uranium, 80 billion dollars and graft. Bake in an improvised exploding device or immolated suicide car bomb. Dust lightly with cluster bomblets. Dribble capitalist honey comfit with Halliburton, Bechtel and Kellogg-Root and Brown flavorings onto mix. Must be served by heavily armed occupation forces wearing body armor. Makes for a treacly-sweet dessert that sticks to your ribs forever.

Tony Blair's Key Lime Pie: Ask George Bush what he would like to eat for dinner. Prepare it for him. Ask George Bush what he would like for dessert. Make it for him. Ask George Bush what he would like to drink with dinner. Serve it to him. Wash up George Bush's dirty dishes, licking the plates clean. Sweep up all the after dinner crumbs from George Bush's dinner table. Mold George Bush's dinner crumbs into a pie crust. Add several thousand British soldiers and a few kiwis. Bake in Middle Eastern oven indefinitely.

Ken Lay's Corporate Triple Layer Cake: Allow governments to construct important infrastructure at public expense -- like postal service, highways, public utilities and power transmission lines, schools, internet, hospitals and prisons. Then start wars to starve governments of funds so that they cannot sustain public infrastructure. Buy on the cheap, privatize or steal outright public infrastructure in the name of creating jobs and tax revenue in an age of declining public funds. Acquire everything and everyone. Then lay off employees of acquired infrastructure and avoid paying taxes by outsourcing abroad and moving corporate headquarters to the Caribbean. As for laid off starving citizens, let them eat Ken Lay's corporate triple layer cake.

John Roberts Mystery Meatloaf: This is a wonderful meatloaf recipe, but unfortunately, Judge Roberts doesn't remember how he used to make it. Once the master chef at the ultra-conservative Federalist Club Royale and Creperie, Judge Roberts now cannot remember any of his prize-winning recipes for abortion rights, separation of constitutional powers, tort law, civil rights, anti-trust law or affirmative action. He barely remembers working in the Reagan Administration kitchen or helping to cook the election books in Florida's 2000 presidential elections. Nevertheless, the President assures us that we should trust John Roberts' culinary skills no matter what kind of mystery meatloaf he might eventually serve up.

John Negroponte's Super Secret Surveillance Sauce: Look for secret ingredients in your neighbor's mailbox. Then look for more secret ingredients in your neighbor's computer Internet files. Enter, without knocking and without a warrant, into your neighbor's home, being careful to rifle her dresser drawers for more secret ingredients without leaving a trace that you were there. Secretly obtain your neighbor's library reading habits. Digitally record your neighbor's super secret telephone conversations. Secretly videotape your neighbor's comings and goings. Open a file and pour all secret ingredients inside. Mix secretly using super secret electronic surveillance methods. Stamp “classified” and “top secret”. Arrest and try neighbor using secret ingredients from file.

Gail Norton's Baked Alaska Desert: Increase emissions of greenhouse gases. Ignore Kyoto Protocols. Allow ocean temperatures to increase and marine life to die off. Ignore increasingly powerful hurricanes, rain storms and cyclones. Pretend that global weather weirding is not occurring. Insist that summers are not getting warmer nor the Gulf Stream weakening. Watch as northern glaciers melt. Open up ANWR wildlife preserve for oil drilling as Alaska bakes and turns into a desert.

Albert Gonzalez's Constitutional Crepes: This is a quaint recipe based on Mr. Gonzalez's ever popular Geneva Conventions Pancakes. First, mix up a batter of the Bill of Rights. Fold in sour cream, a stick of butter, a pinch of salt, and the whites of a dozen eggs. Take to Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay Cuba. Beat and torture the batter for weeks on end without sleeping. Now decant First, Third, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, Eighth, Ninth, Tenth and Fourteenth Amendments from the constitutional batter and flush down the toilet. Press flattened, denatured constitutional crepes on iron pan lightly greased with low sulfur sweet crude oil from Saudi Arabia and cook at constant low heat. Sweeten with confectioners sugar, maple syrup and saccharin phrases about protecting the Constitution.

Robert Zoellick's Free Market Fettuccini: Purchase 2 bags of wheat flour from Canada on condition that Canada dismantle its national health care system. Buy 3 wheels of cheese from Argentina on condition that Argentina accept a 60 trillion dollar IMF loan at 20% interest. Import ½ pound of pistachio nuts from Costa Rico provided that it sign on to CAFTA and reduces the retirement benefits for its citizens. Cook in bottled water extracted from deep wells in India. Acquire Nigerian oil to boil water on condition that Nigeria allow American corporations to acquire all of its resources at fire sale prices. Use devalued dollars to pay for everything while chanting capitalist and free market mantra. Strain fettuccini. Dump scalding hot water on China for attempting to make Free Market Fettuccini like we do.

Scott McClellan's Soup du Jour:

Round about the cauldron go;
In the press releases throw.
War, that under hot Iraq
Days and nights has sweated
Poisonous rot,
Boil thou first in White House pot.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn, and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a Condi snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of Newt and Foggy Bottom,
Wooly words and tongue of blog,
Blind press sting and Chalabi,
Judith Miller, Scooter Libby –
For a soup of powerful trouble,
Like a hell broth, boil and bubble.

Double, double, toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Halliburton, Wolfowitz,
Afghan pipelines, Iran oil,
Luis Posada's secret file,
Yellow cake dug in the dark,
Joseph Wilson's ears and nose,
Aristide, Chavez's toes,
Coup d'état-ed by moon's eclipse,
Fox TV, Bin Laden's lips,
Finger of unwanted babe,
Caused by dumping Roe v. Wade,
Make the gruel thick and gooey:
Add thereto the starving children,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.
Now serve to a credulous public,
Support the Prez, damn the Republic.
 

Zbignew Zingh can be reached at Zbig@ersarts.com. This Article is CopyLeft, and free to distribute, reprint, repost, sing at a recital, spray paint, scribble in a toilet stall, etc. to your heart’s content, with proper author citation. Find out more about Copyleft and read other great articles at www.ersarts.com.

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