Bush vs Mencken: no contest

President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss “intelligent design” alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life . . . “I think that part of education is to expose people to different schools of thought,” Bush said. “You’re asking me whether or not people ought to be exposed to different ideas, the answer is yes.”

George W. Bush, interview with Texas reporters, 1 August 2005

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.

H.L. Mencken, The Scopes Trial: Homo Neanderthalensis, 29 June 1925

The whole of Mencken's piece is worth a read, as ever, although I do wonder how many of his readers knew what a Chandala was, let alone a super-Chandala (or should that be infra-Chandala)? I didn't. And I could be wrong yet.