News Flash: Obamacare Haters Hate Obamacare

July 10 (Bloomberg) -- Edwin Durning-Lawrence was a writerand a member of the U.K. Parliament who devoted much of his lifeto an obsessive, and slightly crazy, effort to demonstrate thatFrancis Bacon wrote the works usually attributed to WilliamShakespeare. Durning-Lawrence published his defining book,“Bacon is Shakespeare,” in 1910. (My real topic is 21st-centurypolitics, but bear with me for a moment.)

Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s, was an influentialphilosopher who also served as a member of Parliament. Durning-Lawrence greatly admired Bacon, but he didn’t much likeShakespeare, whom he described as an illiterate and, morespecifically, as “the mean, drunken, ignorant, and absolutelyunlettered, rustic of Stratford who never in his life wrote somuch as his own name and in all probability was totally unableto read one single line of print.”