It started with Jason Peters rewriting William Blake. Then John Willson performed a dental colostomy* on Tiger, with FPR contributor Jeffrey Polet, I and at least a few others taking exception to what we thought was an extremely harsh tone. Now at last Polet has published his own promised thoughts on L’Affaire Tiger.

It was timely for me. I have avoided the details of Tiger’s transgressions, but moments before clicking on a link to Polet’s piece, I stumbled across a reproduction of some of Tiger’s text messages to a porn star mistress, and they were pretty shocking. I won’t link to them. I don’t think there’s a shortage of ways to track down the salacious detail.

I don’t recall who said “to understand all is to forgive all.” A quick Googling suggests that it’s probably a French proverb – proof again that the French are more than “cheese-eating surrender monkeys” (as Jonah Goldberg called them. I can’t help but laugh at many French jokes, as the French in my experience deserve a reputation for haughtiness. There’s a reason why one Wall Street Journal columnist always refers to John Kerry as “the haughty, French looking Senator from Massachusetts who, by the way, served in Vietnam.”). But Polet’s analogy between Tiger and a tempestuous genius of an earlier century puts things in an edifying perspective. It helps to understand, and to me “feels right,” as I try to empathize with the temptations of superstardom.

I could meander off into some personal reflections about how easy it is to condemn X immediately after condemning Y’s condemnation of Z, but I won’t.

* “Dental colostomy” is a euphemism for the slang phrase “chewing him a new [body part omitted].” I think I coined it.