For four long years now, Professor John J. Pitney Jr. of Claremont-McKenna College has provided THE SCRAPBOOK with dispatches from the front lines of the war against "fake Tocqueville" -- the most widely circulating falsely attributed quotation in all America. The news has been uniformly bad; the damn thing refuses to die. And now another high-level setback: President Clinton, for the second time in as many years, has cited "Tocqueville."
Let's go to the videotape, this from last week's White House prayer breakfast -- the one at which Clinton announced that he's still undergoing faith-based "counseling" for . . . you know, his "problem":
"Now, if you go back to what de Tocqueville said [actually it was some anonymous twentieth century speechwriter], that 'America is great because America is good,' and then you realize somehow we've managed to make the most of this incredibly complex, modern economy, it seems strange, if the murder rate is still higher here and the accidental death rate is exponentially higher. Why is that? Is that because we're not good, but we're evil? Is it because we're not smart, but we're stupid?" Maybe.