William Hazlitt on Barack Obama, Or: Why the Ridiculous Is no Laughing Matter
http://pjmedia.com/rogerkimball/2012/06/23/william-hazlitt-on-barack-obama-or-why-the-ridiculous-is-no-laughing-matter/?singlepage=true
“Those who lack delicacy,” Hazlitt observed, “hold us in their power.” All rumors to the contrary, and despite the principle enunciated by Jorgé Luis Borges that allows us to speak of such prodigies as Wordsworth’s influence on Milton, Hazlitt was not writing about Barack Obama. Yet he might have been, just as he might have been writing about Obama and his administration (calling you, Eric Holder) that “gentlemen are no match for blackguards.” The reason is not far to seek. “The former,” Hazlitt explains, “are on the their honour, act on the square,” while the latter, . . . well, you know.
A gentleman, for example, does not lie under oath. On September 7th, 2011, Eric Holder denied to Darrell Issa’s congressional committee that knowledge of Fast and Furious, the convert gun-walking program that left dozens of Mexican’s and U.S. Border Agent Brian Terry dead, did not reach “into the upper levels of the Justice Department.” “I don’t think,” said the attorney general, that is is “supported by the facts.”