What’s so disturbing about Chris Matthews saying the following about Fred Thompson? “Can you smell the English Leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of — a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.”

I think it’s hilarious — it’s like great dialogue from a smart movie. Not Paddy Chayefsky as much as…I can’t think of which screenwriter’s stuff sounds like this precisely, but I love it. Sounds like a real guy talking.

Speaking of Chayefsky: “He had at that time perhaps an hour to live, although prompt treatment would have saved his life. As a staff doctor he was seen without preliminaries. His vital signs were taken, including an electrocardiagram which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history, and then he was promptly, simply…forgotten to death.

“Simply mislaid. Mislaid among the broken wrists, the chest pains, the scalp lacerations. The man whose fingers were crushed in a taxi door. The infant with a skin rash. The child swiped by a car. The old lady mugged in a subway. The dere- lict beaten by sailors. The teenage suicide. The paranoids, drunks, asthmatics. The rapes, the sceptic abortions…the overdosed addicts, the fractures, hemmorhages, concussions, boils, abrasions. The colonic cancers, the cardiac arrests…the whole wounded madhouse of our times.”