McClatchy’s Joseph Galloway says George W. Bush has fulfilled a Mencken prophecy:

On July 26th, 1920, the acerbic and cranky scribe wrote in The Baltimore Sun: “…all the odds are on the man who is, intrinsically, the most devious and mediocre — the man who can most easily (and) adeptly disperse the notion that his mind is a virtual vacuum. The presidency tends, year by year, to go to such men. As democracy is perfected, the office represents, more closely, the inner soul of the people. We move toward a lofty ideal. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

I don’t know that Bush is a moron so much as he’s a man who refuses to expose himself to (much less learn) anything that challenges what he thinks he already knows. It’s not that he’s dumb. It’s that he has no interest in getting smarter. He’s a man who, as Stephen Colbert would say, “thinks with his gut.”

I’ve commented before on how apt Mencken’s punditry would’ve applied to our predicaments today. Between the moral rectitude crowd, the neoconservatives, and the public health activists, I suspect Mencken would’ve had a ball had he stuck around another fifty years. And the guy was a born blogger. His early columns for the Baltimore Sun certainly read like one.

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