Someone should collect a book of things that people wish they’d never said, a sort of signpost on the road to notoriety. Bill Clinton’s disquisition on the meaning of “is” (which, as a philosophy major, I greatly appreciated), Dan Quayle’s John F. Kennedy comparison, Gerald Ford on Poland, and so on.

I’m not sure why all of these are political; I’m sure that there is an equal wealth of not merely wrong or fatuous statements that people have made in business and art and elsewhere, but statements of such surpassing awfulness that they are without peer. And someone should collect them all in a book.