How Did H.L. Mencken Know About GW Bush?

H.L. Mencken called it 80 years ago, and it's just as true now as it was then:

"The so-called religious organizations which now lead the war against the teaching of evolution are nothing more, at bottom, than conspiracies of the inferior man against his betters. They mirror very accurately his congenital hatred of knowledge, his bitter enmity to the man who knows more than he does, and so gets more out of life.
...
"Such organizations, of course, must have leaders; there must be men in them whose ignorance and imbecility are measurably less abject than the ignorance and imbecility of the average. These super-Chandala often attain to a considerable power, especially in democratic states. Their followers trust them and look up to them; sometimes, when the pack is on the loose, it is necessary to conciliate them. But their puissance cannot conceal their incurable inferiority. They belong to the mob as surely as their dupes, and the thing that animates them is precisely the mob's hatred of superiority. Whatever lies above the level of their comprehension is of the devil."

-- from "Homo Neanderthalensis", The Baltimore Evening Sun,
June 29, 1925

Le plus ça change, plus c'est le meme chose, as the French say.

Thanks and a tip o' the redneck billcap to Billmon over at The Whiskey Bar.