And Get a Haircut, Francois

It isn't often I come across an expression of outrage so withering that it makes me look shy in comparison. When I do, I have the good sense to step out of its way. So here's Garrison Keillor -- yes, that Garrison Keillor --  just absolutely flaying the living skin off French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy, author of "American Vertigo: Traveling America in the Footsteps of Tocqueville." There's something downright inspirational about Keillor's pique, and it goes beyond the frisson you get from seeing a smartypants know-it-all cut down to size. I think it has something to do with an eminence like Keillor, who has built a career out of a sort of stylized reticence, rising up in righteous wrath. It's like watching Bruce Banner morph into The Incredible Hulk, if Banner were from Minnesota and spoke really, really quietly:

You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there's nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food. You've lived all your life in America, never attended a megachurch or a brothel, don't own guns, are non-Amish, and it dawns on you that this is a book about the French. There's no reason for it to exist in English, except as evidence that travel need not be broadening and one should be wary of books with Tocqueville in the title.

And that's just the first paragraph.

Mr. Irresponsible's battered fedora is tipped to Keillor today. Go take a look. (N.B., Keillor's piece was published by The New York Times, a paper with such high regard for its online readers that it allows them to enjoy both a draconian signup process and a battery of popup ads. Which is so typique of the morally bankrupt American intelligentsia, don't you know.)