Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Piling on O’Neill

The Kinsley column Steve links below is pretty good, but it raises a question that has been bothering me ever since O’Neill hit the morning-show circuit: What exactly does it mean to say that someone is "a blind man in a roomful of deaf people"? This Dan Henninger piece on OpinionJournal gives the answer: "The blind person wouldn’t recognize Mr.O’Neill, and the deaf people wouldn’t listen to him."

I have a strange interest in complicated insults. Like in The Iliad, when Achilles tells all the Greeks that King Agamemnon has the eyes of a dog and the heart of a deer. At first, it makes no sense, then you realize that Agamemnon must be pretty ugly, because it would be better to have the eyes of a deer than a dog, then you realize that Agamemnon must be pretty craven, because it would be better to have the heart of a dog than a deer, and so forth . . . . Anyway, Henninger’s insight about O’Neill’s phrase is just devastating. O’Neill heaped a complicated insult on himself.

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