Lynne Kiesling
I am studiously trying to ignore the presidential season, but Alex Massie’s Wodehouse-ian gloss on Hillary Clinton (and, tangentially, Mike Huckabee at the end) really made me laugh, and has enough of a grain of truth in it to be insightful.
In my sourer moments I find myself persuaded that Bertie Wooster’s verdict on aunts also applies to politicians: “It is no use telling me that there are bad aunts and good aunts. At the core, they are all alike. Sooner or later, out pops the cloven hoof.”
Never is this more the case than during a Presidential campaign. The sheer ghastliness of the front-runners is something to behold. …
Dipping into The Inimitable Jeeves last night, it struck me that, for a certain kind of chap, Hillary is the Honoria Glossop of the presidential campaign. It’s not just that Hillary’s now infamous “cackle” is dangerously reminiscent of Miss Glossop’s laugh “that sounded like a squadron of cavalry charging across a tin bridge.”
Do, please, go read the whole thing. And if you’ve not read any Wodehouse, you should do that too, sooner rather than later!
See also the comments on the thread and Stephen Bainbridge’s post on the matter for discussion of whether or not there’s latent misogyny here; some interesting comments, some utterly humorless folks with little familiarity with Wodehouse’s writing and characters.
While we’re on the topic of Wodehouse, the DaVinci Code of the Woosters is pretty darn hilarious as well.