Saturday’s Child

From David Aaronovitch’s column about conspiracy theories in the Wall Street Journal :

These cyber-driven days, each new U.S. president has attracted theories of his own, assiduously spread mostly by partisans of the other side. So the saturnine Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster and a whole lot of men in Arkansas (we won’t discuss what he did with the women of Arkansas), the infernal George W. Bush brought down the twin towers, and the foreign Barack Obama isn’t an American at all, and has plotted to cover it up. Interestingly out-of-power Democrats are far more likely to believe the theories about in-power Republicans, and powerless Republicans far more likely to believe them about powerful Democrats. One aspect of conspiracy theories is that they are history for losers.

Not a bad observation, but what does he imagine the word saturnine means? Clinton was many things, but saturnine wasn’t one of them.

Of course, Aaronovitch is a smart writer, and he may have been using the word in a satyrical way.