314 Such a wonderful description

Joseph Epstein, who wrote Envy (2003) has an article in the WSJ today about the gloom and doom attitude of many Conservatives. He describes a speaker with the following wonderful sentence:

So devastatingly gloomy was his prognosis that it could have plucked the smile out of Christmas, the cliches out of the Fourth of July, the joy out of a beagle puppy.

And later he mentions "double parking at the wailing wall." Isn't that great--the writing, I mean, not the speaker.