"How Much Does Italy Owe Amanda Knox? A Lot."

A Vanity Fair article by Judy Bachrach. Excerpt:

Why charge two students with no history of violence? Absent any credible evidence everyone�judges, jurors, media�turned to a one-word answer: sex. Sex made Amanda do just about everything.

This obsession with the American girl�s sex life followed her into prison. Early on, prison authorities falsely informed her that she was H.I.V.-positive, at which point she plunged into despair. Back in her cell, Knox wrote up a list of her previous lovers�which in short order, was leaked to the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera and quoted extensively by an Italian author who came up with what would become a habitual media conclusion, one she confided to The Sunday Times: �It�s as if [she] were always hunting men.�

Thus Knox became every Italian mamma�s worst nightmare: the classic blonde, American manipulator of men. Luciferina with an angel�s face, an Italian newspaper called her. Luciferina was dutifully echoed in the courtroom: the girl was obviously involved in some kind of satanic rite....

Scott Walker's Wisconsin gloom mousse has a testy undertaste, a macho, testy undertaste!

At Yahoo Politics, Senior Political Correspondent Jon Ward has a piece titled "Scott Walker�s gloomy pitch for the presidency." Walker, we're told, once "used the word 'worry' or 'worried' 12 times in the space of 15 minutes":

�As a parent today, I�m worried. I�m worried for our country,� Walker told a few hundred conservative activists in a darkened amphitheater, standing in front of a red stage curtain. �I�m worried about my sons and your sons and daughters, my nieces and your nieces and nephews and grandsons and granddaughters, and I�m worried that we�re headed down that same path that worried me years ago in my own state.�

Ooh! The darkened amphitheater. The red stage curtain. Oh, no: Worry! 

Walker is telling us what's wrong with America. Why not what's right with America? The obvious answer is that if things are going swimmingly, then we should want another Democratic President.

Ward's writing fits squarely into the genre called They'll Tell You Who They're Afraid Of.  He proceeds to blabber about "an undertone of testiness in his stump speech, leavened with chest-swelling machismo fueled by his defeat of a recall effort in 2012 and his re-election in 2014."

Testiness and machismo seem like the opposite of gloom, but I guess gloom is the overtone and testiness is the undertone, while machismo is the leavening.

I won't accuse Ward of mixing metaphors. I think he's got a consistent food-prep metaphor going there.

It calls to mind that line from "Rosemary's Baby." Rosemary takes a nibble of the mousse that the devil-worshiping next-door neighbor has tainted with a knock-out drug and worries: "It has an under-taste. A chalky under-taste."



What's in this mousse anyway? "Mousse," in Wisconsin, we call it "mouse," because we are as naive-or-sinister as the Satanist next door. It's gloom mousse, but it has a testy undertaste, a macho, testy undertaste!