Unless you subscribe to the Atlantic, you may not know the details of former White House speechwriter Matthew Scully’s hissy fit over former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson hogging the credit for Bush’s silver tongue.

But all you need to know about this inconsequential matter can be found in Sidney Blumenthal’s posting today on The Smirking Chimp. Actually all you need to know can be found in hundreds of restrooms all over America, where poetry lovers have indited these words:

A man’s ambition

Must be small

To write his name

On a shithouse wall.

Or, as Blumenthal puts it less succinctly:

Scully’s memoir is unusual in the annals of Washington tell-alls. Typically, the disillusioned narrator wishes to distance himself from failure, assign blame to others or expiate his guilt. Scully, however, desperately wants to claim his proper share of credit for the Bush catastrophe.

While he accuses the devout Gerson of bad faith, he never quite recognises why Gerson’s credit-hogging has seemed so plausible. Whether or not Gerson wrote what he claimed to have written, the orotund, purple prose that is his style is completely consistent with Bush’s high-flown rhetoric.

Phrases like “axis of evil” mark Bush’s language as a torrent of incoherence, arrogance and fanaticism. But the stupidity of the ideas is no hindrance to the fight over pride of authorship …

The conflict between Matthew Scully and Michael Gerson (below) is a clash between two cardinal sins: the bearer of envy meets the bearer of false witness. Scully is transparently envious of the rewards bestowed on Gerson by the Washington Post Corp — both Post and Newsweek columns — suggesting a payoff to a source, an unreliable one at that.