Wallace Shawn

Catching up with some pre-election whining, as James Taranto highlighted Friday in his “Best of the Web Today” compilation, character actor/playwright Wallace Shawn “blames President Bush for wrecking his love life and causing writer's block.” Shawn, a short man with a distinctive voice you'd recognize from his many guest roles on TV shows (IMDb page), from Murphy Brown to Law & Order: CI (screen shot is from a 2006 episode of that NBC drama), complained to the Times of London:

Bush has openly mocked law and proclaimed a certain pleasure in sadism and exulted in holding prisoners and mistreating and torturing them, really. Of course this affects one emotionally: my emotional life has been very strongly affected by the fact that Bush was president and my writing life is affected by my emotional life.

Taranto quipped: “If Wallace Shawn's output increases substantially in the next four years, a lot of people may find they miss George W. Bush.”