Kieran Healy

Gilding the Lily

It’s worth reading Josh Marshall’s assessment of “Washington’s newfound appreciation of the ‘subtleties’ of truth-telling” with regard to Iraq’s apparent non-arsenal of non-weapons of non-mass destruction.

Along the way, he quotes Bill Keller who says “What the Bush administration did was gild the lily”. The phrase is corrupted from from Shakespeare (can’t remember what play), where the original line is “To gild refined gold, to paint the lily…” This makes more sense as an image. But as I think Mark Kleiman was arguing a while ago, this may be another one of those cases where colloquial misquotation improves on the original.

Allow me to be the 10,000th—it’s from King John:

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.

KJ iv, 2

But is the administration gilding a lily? Aren’t they gilding something less, um, beautiful?