The smirking frat boy

This is going to be great. An interview with Gary Trudeau is going to be published Friday in The Rolling Stone, a magazine I loathe but I may be forced to purchase just to read this. It must be a little weird for him in our current political climate, since he is drawing cartoons about many of the same people he was mocking when he started out in college at Yale. John Kerry, George Bush, Howard Dean--he lists them in the online excerpt. And he doesn't have very nice things to say about when he knew Bush in college.

He could also make you feel extremely uncomfortable. He was very good at all the tools for survival that people developed in prep school -- sarcasm, and the giving of nicknames. He was extremely skilled at controlling people and outcomes in that way. Little bits of perfectly placed humiliation.

I wonder if the White House is going to contain themselves and ignore this one, or if they will retaliate and release withering press releases like they almost always do when they get a modicum of criticism from any prominent source. Of course, his revelations are none too surprising to those of us who had to endure the all-too-common Smirking Fratboys in college. But The Rolling Stone is a magazine that actually reaches some Republican readers. I doubt it will change any votes, but it might be a splash of cold water in some faces.