[muawiyah]

Mencken kept private diaries. When they were discovered awhile back it was revealed that he was a closet anti-semite!

Guess that means Liberals are anti-semites. But we already knew that.

[Morgan's Raider]

OK, can the author of this debacle say "projection"?

Did you read the "commentaries" on the article? They have the mutual admiration society of Moe, Larry, Curly, Larry, Darrell and Darrell with a Sheila Jackson-Lee clone added for comic relief engaged in a first-class circle jerk stroking the hell out of each others' 'superior' intellect and egos. You sure this web address isn't a direct link to DU?

[keithtoo]

I Freeped this dweeb, but in all honesty, paying too much attention to these private message boards gives those parents-basement-living-low-lifes a little too much of the attention that they obviously are craving.

[gcruse]

 
Translation: No, wait, they're not just uneducated, they're mentally deficient.

Does the fact that you found it necessary to add your
translations of the article indicate that you think
Freepers are too uneducated and mentally
deficient to read something and make up
their own minds?  Think about it.

[x]

This is a pretty trashy and trivial article. Most of what most people write about conservatives -- or liberals -- isn't of much value to anyone than themselves. What they're doing is just talking about people they don't like. The problem with such talk can be seen in how Mencken's contempt for the "average American" becomes a liberal principle. If Hart were thinking seriously, and not just thrashing about in search of ammunition, the connection between liberalism and cynicism might trouble him.

Mencken has come full circle. The young liberals and radicals of the Twenties idolized him. When Mencken applied the same ironic denunciation to FDR as to Coolidge, Harding and Hoover, the more earnest liberals of the 1930s reviled him. Conservatives and libertarians picked Mencken up again in the 1970s. Now it's a liberals turn to argue that Mencken was really a liberal. But it doesn't wash. Mencken was a cynic, an antinomian, an ironist, a Nietzschean, and more than half a nihilist. Of course Mencken would sock it to conservative, religious, political and business leaders, but he was even more scathing with liberal or radical "idealists" and "crusaders." His denunciations of Puritans apply equally to the Ralph Naders and Hillary Clintons as to the Fallwells or Robertsons.

Mencken knew language. He wielded it like a saber or a rapier, but not like a "surgical laser," unless Dr. Evil was working it. Striking the deepest blow and drawing blood were more important to Mencken than precision or accuracy or fairness.