Important as always is Daniel

Important as always is Daniel Pipes’s latest essay: “The Scandal of US-Saudi Relations.” The essay appears in the winter issue of the National Interest (not, as I erroneously stated earlier, the winter issue of Middle East Quarterly, the flagship publication of Pipes’s invaluable Middle East Forum organization), and is long enough that it should be printed out and read at your leisure.
To borrow Peter Schramm’s unit of measurement on No Left Turns, the essay is a four-coffee read. But given the nature of Pipes’s essay, I need to add a refinement to this unit of measurement. The refinement is derived from the Albert Brooks School of Comedy and is known as the Danny Thomas double take. As explained by Brooks in one of his lessons on elementary comedy moves, the Danny Thomas double take is the expression of shock by means of spitting a mouthful of coffee across the room. Pipes’s essay is a four-coffee read with ten Danny Thomas double takes.