Mary McCarthy once famously skewered fellow writer Lillian Hellman as “tremendously overrated, a bad writer, a dishonest writer … Every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the.'” It created quite a stir at the time (1980) and led, as nearly every breeze ruffling so much as a feather in America often does, to a lawsuit.

I think of McCarthy because President Obama’s record for wrongheadedness is about as reliable as Hellman’s was for dishonesty. (Hellman was a Stalinist, so calling her a liar was redundant.)