This time a cartoon from the sick mind of Steve Bell in – where else? – the Guardian.
NEIL BUSH AND BILL CLINTON: What on earth are prominent Americans doing buckraking in – of all places – Saudi Arabia? Neil Bush is a disgrace – clearly using his family connections to make a mint off his brother’s education reform bill. Mike Isikoff has the details – it’s truly sickening. And a former president? At this delicate time? What is he thinking?
THE END IS NIGH: Joe Conason agrees with me on Punditgate. He even calls Paul Krugman’s $50K “dismaying.” It would have been nice of him to have credited me with breaking the news of Kristol’s $100K, but, hey, you can’t win ’em all.
JOHNSON’S INSULTS: Who can beat Samuel Johnson? A reader sends in the following classics. In reference to a Mrs. Robinson’s essay on Shakespeare:
“Reynolds: ‘I think that essay does her honour.’
Johnson: ‘Yes, Sir, it does her honour, but it would do nobody else honour. I have indeed, not read it all. But when I take up the end of a web, and find it packthread, I do not expect, by looking further, to find embroidery.'”
Then there’s Johnson’s response to someone calling one Thomas Gray “a dull fellow”:
“Boswell: ‘I understand he was reserved, and might appear dull in company; but surely he was not dull in poetry.’
Johnson: ‘Sir, he was dull in company, dull in his closet, dull everywhere. He was dull in a new way, and that made many people think him GREAT. He was a mechanical poet.'”
Or this, from Johnson’s “Lives of the Poets” on Milton:
“Paradise Lost is one of the books which the reader admires and puts down,and forgets to take up again. None ever wished it longer than it is.”
Ouch.
The Dish 