Just in time for H. L. Mencken’s birthday.
Mark Steyn, perhaps Mencken’s closest modern counterpart, brings us these notes:
Bush Re-Enters the Room
The Years We Wasted
As Mencken wrote:
“Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.”
————“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed – and hence clamorous to be led to safety – by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”
————“It is the invariable habit of bureaucracies, at all times and everywhere, to assume…that every citizen is a criminal. Their one apparent purpose, pursued with a relentless and furious diligence, is to convert the assumption into a fact. They hunt endlessly for proofs, and, when proofs are lacking, for mere suspicions. The moment they become aware of a definite citizen, John Doe, seeking what is his right under the law, they begin searching feverishly for an excuse for withholding it from him.”
Or punishing him for the quest:
[E]ven former Surgeon General Jerome Adams, who has been consistently pro-vaccine and very friendly to the virus policies of Anthony Fauci and Biden, observed that the president’s mandate speech was “delivered to leave you feeling angry if vaccinated, and ashamed if unvaccinated. It was a war speech, but the enemy wasn’t the virus — it was your neighbor.”
And this just in from ragnardaneskjold – in response to my comment that, “Dubya’s 9/11 speech was just family Trump hatred“:
When petty animus meets modern virtue signaling amid apparent ignorance of the chasm between a few broken windows and premeditated mass murder.
To which we should add arson, including of Federal buildings, and mass looting.
On Jan. 6 there was no arson, the looting was minor… the few objects looted already the people’s property. If you’re pissed about the lectern, just remember it wasn’t Nancy Pelosi’s: It was yours.
Those who think it was Pelosi’s probably agree with Dubya.
Finally, let’s stipulate that while Trump also more than satisfies Mencken’s disdain for windbag authoritarian assholes, his stewardship never approached Biden’s blatant scupidity (my stupidity/cupidity portmanteau). Trump, at the very least, has a respect for the United States of America that Biden can’t even imagine. And Trump has a will of his own.
The yawning gap between the lesser of the Trump/Biden evils is being made terrifyingly apparent every time the animatronic placeholder occupying the assisted living facility now operating at 1600 Pennsylvania opens his mouth, or has a decision made for him about which sycophantic reporter’s softball question he is allowed to answer.
And he’s doing his best to increase to cost of ammo.