… is from page 233 of H.L. Mencken’s 1927 essay “On Controversy,” as this essay is reprinted in the 1996 Johns Hopkins University Press collection of some of Mencken’s essays, Prejudices: A Selection:
Have you ever examined carefully the speeches made by the candidates in a Presidential campaign? If so, you know that they are of bilge and blather all compact. Now and then, true enough, one of the august aspirants to the Washington breeches is goaded or misled into saying something pungent and even apposite, but not often, not deliberately. His daily stint is simply balderdash.
DBx: What was true a century ago is no less true today. Indeed, I suspect that the campaign speeches of people such as Calvin Coolidge, John Davis, Al Smith, Herbert Hoover, and FDR were, when compared to those of Trump and Biden, downright Ciceroean.
