A sort of wind tunnel effect...

Some light relief fresh from the Wide World of Decency: the picaresque adventures of Bernard Henri Levy:

It was a pure BHL production, one-third fiction, one-third self-promotion, one-third reality. BHL chartered his own jet to get to Georgia. He headquartered at a five-star hotel in the capital, and stayed all of two and half days before flying to Nice. He taxied to Gori, which had been occupied by the Russians, and made his way past checkpoints to the center of town. He reported devastation. “Gori does not belong to the Ossetia which the Russians claim they have come to ‘liberate.’ It is a Georgian town. And they have burned it down, pillaged it, reduced it to a ghost town.” But this was not true. A careful study of BHL’s trip concludes he never reached the town; and witnesses agree that Gori was attacked, but hardly burned down.

With gusto the critics took BHL’s reporting apart. An English newspaper commented, “The Americans have sent blankets and the Estonians doctors, but it is the French, surely, who have come to the rescue of South Ossetia’s people, with their offer to send nouveau philosophe Bernard-Henri Lévy.” The paper noted that BHL was staying at the Tbilisi Marriott with a personal photographer, publicist, and bodyguard. The entourage is easy to spot, reported a guest. “They are all loafing around in the foyer puffing clouds of smoke, and gesticulating meaningfully. BHL is in his element going around in a crumpled white shirt, hair coiffed into a sort of wind tunnel effect, and reeking of perfume.”

Plenty more where that came from, though the author assures all good lefties that they must nonetheless take him seriously. I disagree. Someone should give the bouffant blowhard his own television series. I was thinking of reality TV, though somehow that doesn’t seem quite right.