The NYRB published a review essay this past August about John Bolton’s most recent book. Without getting into its substance, I have to quote passages that make me question my writing ability:
Hedging against the remote possibility that some readers are smart enough to decipher spuriousness…
and
Even more trying are his sour, stilted witticisms, some of which he feels compelled to point out are supposed to be funny—in case any bleeding-heart types are too dumb to realize it.
The Review published a similar piece back in 2008 (sub,. req.) about Bolton’s first book. Readers can make what they will of this sentence:
Whether a consistent and comprehensive foreign policy, no longer intoxicated by ideological or neo-imperial fantasy, will emerge from this change of attitude is far from clear.