(continued)

Sinner: John McCain, for offering this handy alternative to actual health care: "Watch your diet, walk thirty or so minutes a day, and take a few other simple precautions, and you won't have to worry about these afflictions."

Winner: Felicitous phrase maker Gail Collins: "One hitch in the Clinton argument is that Hillary still has Bill, a walking encyclopedia of political near-death experiences."

Winner: Leon Wieseltier, for the most original Passover greeting for a goy: "The ink on the Times was not yet dry when Andrew Sullivan rushed to the defense of his idol, I mean Obama. When one types all the time, sooner or later everything will be typed, and so Sullivan, in his fury against Kristol, typed this: 'A non-Christian manipulator of Christianity is calling a Christian a liar about his faith.' Ponder that early adjective. It is Jew baiting. I was not aware that only Christians can judge Christians, or that there are things about which a Jew cannot call a Christian a liar. If Kristol is wrong about Obama, it is not because Kristol is a Jew. So this fills me with a certain paschal wrath. Nice little blog you have there, Obama boy. Pity if frogs or locusts should happen to it. Let my people be!"

Andrew replied that this was "an extremely wounding blow." Then Leon made a rare retreat: "I know as an incontrovertible fact, based on my long acquaintance with him and his writings, that [Andrew] is not an anti-Semite."

Sinner: Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for telling Lesley Stahl on 60 Minutes that the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment did not apply to those lucky prisoners at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, because Scalia does not believe that "anybody ever referred to torture as punishment."

Reporter: Richard Vanderford
Seen Something? E-mail to alert me to anything you see that warrants high praise or high dudgeon.

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.

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