* "My Poor Little Boy" Tweeting

Tweetido?

Not quite a Dominique Strauss-Kahn whose libido got him indicted, but approaching a Representative Anthony Weiner whose tweetido made him an international joke, the posthumous reputation of Benjamin Franklin definitely raises questions about the appropriateness of  the 74-year old American representative's approach to females in France of 1779. 

Hear his "tweet" to Madame Brillon, which I quote from H.W. Brands' biography The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin:

"Switching metaphors, he [Franklin] employed a figure of speech that could be interpreted doubly, and --- given his care with words --- was almost certainly intended to be . 'My poor little boy, whom you ought to methinks have cherished, instead of being fat and jolly like those in your elegant drawings, is meagre and starved almost to death for want of the substantial nourishment which you his mother inhumanly deny him' " (Brands, 554)