I wanted to feel for Mr Horsley, the scandalous author barred from entry to the US this week as, frankly, scandalous authors are so unimportant that they should not register on any biometric or X-ray monitors at any airport. But little did I realize that he was also a big jerk:

In interviews, though, he has been repeatedly coy about what is real and what is contrived. "It’s better to be quotable than honest," he told Time Out London in February. In an interview with The Independent last September, he said: "I don’t speak, I quote. I am a fraud. I have cobbled together my personality from hundreds of little bits. I am simultaneously the most genuine and the most artificial person you will ever meet." In his interview with The New York Times on Wednesday, Mr. Horsley insisted the memoir was true. "I’m a dandy, so I like to play with words," he said. "I am real, but in an artificial way, because I like to play with language. But my story is completely true."

Little did he know he was triggering the provisions of the JAOB Act of 1803 - Jerks At Our Borders. The US government was only fulfilling its obligations to keep "idiots, fools, loudmouths, popinjays and arseholes of diverse nature from the shores of these United States" to quote the definitions section at article 1(d). The last time we heard much about the JOAB Act was back in 1982 when Nancy Regan floated the balloon of the short-lived and soon over-shadowed "Just Say No To Jerks" campaign. In the 1930s, however, there was a much greater use of the statutory powers under the Hoover administration which was one reason for the flowering of the literary salons of Paris France during the early years of that decade. Mr. Horsley's plight is just a reminder that our freedoms have relied upon the control of jerks through deportation...or election to mid-western senatorial or mid-Atlantic gubernatorial office.