Wow, when did Fox News decide to take the advice of "liberal" authors?
Liberal is used in quotes because Fox news considers all authors who do not work for Fox news to be liberal, regardless of their actual views.
You mean
Mencken, you pitiful schmuck?
Insofar as I've been able to discern, H.L. Mencken started his life as a "Solid Gold" Bourbon Democrat, in that era when the party was typified by Grover Cleveland on the national scene, advocating the elimination of protective tariffs (genuinely free trade), the gold standard implemented strictly (with specie in circulation, strict enforcement of gold reserve clauses, as well as large U.S. Treasury holdings of bullion), and staunch opposition to government "charity." In 1887, Cleveland had written in a message to the U.S. House of Representatives:
"I feel obliged to withhold my approval of the plan, as proposed by this bill, to indulge a benevolent and charitable sentiment through the appropriation of public funds for that purpose.
"I can find no warrant for such an appropriation in the Constitution, and I do not believe that the power and duty of the General Government ought to be extended to the relief of individual suffering which is in no manner properly related to the public service or benefit. A prevalent tendency to disregard the limited mission of this power and duty should, I think, be steadfastly resisted, to the end that the lesson should be constantly enforced that though the people support the Government the Government should not support the people." When Ron Paul was asked recently by a vapid lamestream media TV interviewer who his favorite U.S. president is, he answered: "Grover Cleveland."
It was such fun to watch the deer-in-the-headlamps response of that female hairspray-head. Her supposedly expert analyst vapor-locked completely, too, both of them missing the point altogether.
It was when the "progressives" (we call 'em "Liberals" today) took over the Democratic Party by way of William Jennings Bryan and then "St. Woodrow" Wilson, Mencken went into full opposition to that faction, choosing instead to support the old-line conservatives, working with men like Maryland's Governor Albert Ritchie (an anti-Prohibition "wet," naturally) in opposition to Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
The word "Liberals" today - as with Woodrow Wilson and FDR - means nothing more than (as wargames designer Greg Costikyan once put it) "milk-and-water socialists." Mencken was staunchly anti-socialist; one of his earliest published books was, in fact,
Men versus the Man: a Correspondence between Robert Rives La Monte, Socialist and H. L. Mencken, Individualist (1910).
To count Mencken as a "Liberal" (used in quotes because socialists are emphatically
not defenders of individual human rights) is friggin'
ridiculous.
As in "
You are friggin' ridiculous,
ContraryGuy."
One of the few surviving recordings of Mencken's many radio interviews has him describing himself in political philosophy, in fact, as
"an extreme libertarian." When it comes to what you suppose
"Fox news" to push, you inflamed pucker, Mencken was a lifelong opponent of the (you should pardon the expression) Grand Old Party, merrily crotch-kicking their
prominenten from McKinley forward throughout his career as journalist and essayist.
One of Mencken's better quotes, in fact, runs like so:
"In this world of sin and sorrow there is always something to be thankful for.
As for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican."
So,
ContraryGuy, we all understand that you're malicious and rotten to the core. Now you're proving that you're willfully ignorant and dazzlingly stupid.
What comes next? Exposure of your
physical inadequacies in public?