Thursday, June 27, 2002

And, Vanity Site has some fun with Michael Kelly.


Fat-cheeked, owlish Michael Kelly is almost always indignant about something, and he is not afraid to say so in the strongest of terms. His purported admiration for George Orwell notwithstanding, he has raised the art of heavy sarcasm to heights attained before only by Stalinists. His apprenticeship in indignation science was spent on the rather unpromising Monica Lewinsky panty-raid scandal, and indeed, many think that he damaged his credibility somewhat by his performance there.

The problem is that during the assault on Clinton, which is now recognized to have been a hysterical concoction of libel, slander, rumors, smut, and trivia, Kelly (who doesn't seem to have recovered from the shock of learning how babies are made) turned his patented Spinal Tap dudgeon knob all the way up to eleven. This left him with nothing in reserve for issues which are actually worthy of adult attention. He's been enraged ever since he found out what Monica and Bill did with the cigar, and nothing that happened after that could possible have made him any angrier. Kelly is one of those who keep on explaining to us that everything changed on 9/11, but for Kelly nothing really changed. That fine Havana cigar was Kelly's Twin Towers attack.