Horseshit, Apple Butter, and the Presidency

Back in the day when I was a cook at a rural Iowa steakhouse, I had to work a 10 hour shift on Thanksgiving. We'd roast the turkey days in advance and carve the birds the night before and served everything family style for anyone in east central Iowa who wanted to fork over $25 a head for our "home cooking."

One year we ran out of turkey around 4:15 p.m., 45 minutes before we closed. So the owner, an old-German drunk, decided we'd have to serve processed turkey (the kind for sandwiches) and pass it as home cooked bird. The waitresses started raising all kinds of hell, yelling at us cooks as if this was our great idea.

Here is one conversation I remember:

Wendy: "Do you asshole fuck faces really expect us to send this crap out?"

Me: "And Happy Thanksgiving to you, too."

Wendy: "Go to hell."

When some customers first complained about the Carl Budding quality of our turkey, I got to go tell the owner. Here's how that conversation went:

Me: "A family out there says they know we're not sending real turkey out."

Owner (three sheets to the wind, one hand holding a drink, the other running the meat slicer): "Let me talk to them. They don't know horseshit from apple butter." Then he handed me his drink and walked into the dining area to lecture the customers, I guess about the difference between horseshit and apple butter in terms of texture, taste, origin, and ingredients.

Well, it looks like our President also believes we don't know the difference between horseshit and apple butter. Click here if, like me, you just learned that the turkey Bush was pictured serving to the troops was a fake turkey.

Just like rural Iowa diners know the difference between Carl Budding lunch meat and a 23 pound turkey, it looks like Americans know the difference between a bullshit photo op and a President who cares about the soldiers' who are making sacrifices he never had the courage (or financial need) to make.