Boilshit
Tuesday, July 7 2009
This is Haley Barbour, explaining how cooking frogs is like carbon trading:
When you grow up in the country, like I did, when you cook a frog, you don’t drop him into hot water, cause he’ll jump out. You drop him into cool water, and then you turn up the heat, and it heats up slowly. And politically, the left has tried to protect themselves by pushing the effects off a few years. Because they know once the job losses start and the higher costs kick in, which they inevitably will, that will be bad for them.
The “boiled frog” story is a widely known to be a myth, but the mere fact that Barbour used it is not itself noteworthy. Nor is it remarkable that he used it to argue against climate change legislation, when the story was popularized in Al Gore’s arguments in favor of such legislation. No – what makes this special is that he is implying that this is how he learned to cook frogs in his idyllic, homespun-wisdom- imparting, country childhood. Which is, of course, total bullshit.
I didn’t grow up in the country, but it so happens I know of someone who lived there for many years: Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. And Ms. Rawlings wrote a cookbook entitled Cross Creek Cookery, with scores of strange and fascinating and utterly rural recipes: “Blackbird Pie” (yes, the bird), “Alligator-tail Steak”, “Minorcan Gopher Stew” (as in gopher tortoise), etc.
Rawlings has one recipe for frog: “Orange Lake Frog Legs”, which begins “Wash frog legs thoroughly.” It’s quite clear from the recipe that the legs are already detached from the (deceased) frog; she’s not suggesting you give the frog a spa treatment before he goes into the pot. In any case, the recipe calls for sauteeing the legs, not boiling them. Not that Rawlings is the final authority, but if she doesn’t have a recipe for live boiled frogs, I don’t know who does.
Point being: Haley Barbour needs to share his recipe. His credibility is on the line here, and I don’t think Americans should be satisfied that he knows what he’s talking about until he produces an authentic recipe that calls for live-boiling frogs.
