National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman begins the inevitable backpedaling:
As for Julius Caesar? I made a deliberately outlandish remark, with the delicious (for me, anyway) twist that the last thing people think of with Julius Caesar is that he was a writer. I enjoyed the conceit and never imagined that it would be taken literally. If I have to edit every remark I make because someone somewhere might misunderstand, I’m going to become very dull very fast.
As Ace wrote a couple of years ago, “Lefties want a free reign to speak in absurdities, but also want us to go along with their calling verbal mulligans when their absurdities become punchlines.” The botched joke defense really is the get of jail free card for aging hipsters everywhere, isn’t it?
Caesar wrote Commentaries, a best seller in serial form about the Gaul campaign that helped cement his popularity in Rome. His writing was powerful because it was an accurate account of a truly great man in action. His army was literate, their letters home confirmed the general’s narrative. Archeologists have found the evidence of truth in their digs in France. Obama has some of Caesar’s ego, ruthlessness, and ambition, but in every thing that counts he’s a fraud.
the last thing people think of with Julius Caesar is that he was a writer.
…except for those people, who, you know, studied Latin in High School. Some diligent reporter (I know, “jumbo shrimp”) to ask Rocco to quote the first sentence from the Commentaries.