On
30 Rock last week—who knows anymore when things actually “air”?—Jack Donaghy casually mentioned that he wears “
cologne distilled from the bilge water of Rupert Murdoch’s yacht.” Typically awesome and duly noted. Then, today, the much tumbled-about Thomas Frank, author and speaker of truths about liberalism and the poor, let fly in the WSJ with this: “It is by this familiar maneuver that the people who have designed and supported the policies that have brought the class divide back to America—the people who have actually, really transformed our society from an egalitarian into an elitist one—perfume themselves with the essence of honest toil, like a
cologne distilled from the sweat of laid-off workers.” Likely Frank, whose writing evinces very good taste, picked it up from Tina Fey. And I choose to believe his use of the phrase in the
Journal was no accident.