Stupid Mail And A Notice

I don't have time to write a post on Mencken, here is something you might want to consider from this article.

Look up H. L. Mencken’s review of Mein Kampf, as it appeared in The American Mercury of December 1933. Greatly to the distress of his old friend and publisher Alfred A. Knopf, among others, Mencken felt it his job to explain that the new Führer was potentially onto something good. Not only did he describe as “sensible enough” the idea that “Germany’s first big task is to collar Austria and so consolidate the German people,” but he went on to state that anti-Semitism was more or less to be expected. (“The disadvantage of the Jew is that, to simple men, he always seems a kind of foreigner.”) Though he tried to soften the blow by comparing Hitler to fundamentalist Democrat William Jennings Bryan—harsh dispraise in the Mencken universe—he too found that there was a Jewish-­Bolshevik threat to be combated: “The bloody Räte­republik at Munich—long forgotten elsewhere, but only too well remembered in Germany—had been set up and bossed by a Jew, and there were other Jews high in the councils of the Communist party, which proposed openly to repeat the Munich pillages and butch­er­ies all over the country.”

As to comparing Hitler to William Jennings Bryan, that is about as dishonest a thing as that asshole could have done, considering it was Bryan's undelivered closing speech in the Scopes trial that Mencken covered and helped turn into a circus (the one that the Chamber of Commerce in Dayton Tennessee hoped for) it was Bryan who correctly predicted the total depravity that would result from Darwinism as understood in the 1920s and Mencken who was a fan of the Nazis, as shown in the article.  

I know you remember that fad of quoting the asshole which I mentioned, but, like almost all of those who said, "H. L. Mencken said . . . "  you never read him either.   The ones who had read him and quoted him must not have been too bothered with the awful things he said.  

Note:  I've had a death in my family and will not be posting on Saturday and maybe not on Sunday.