Shove it, Colin
Some days you really have to feel sorry for Pittsburgh Tribune-Review editor Colin McNickle. A man who so eagerly -- and publicly! -- plays Waylon Smithers to Richard Mellon Scaife's C. Montgomery Burns on a daily basis inevitably exudes a certain pathetically lovable charm, even if everything he says is as appalling as it is ridiculous.
This morning, he thinks he's H. L. Mencken, and in some respects he is: all the petty bigotry of a small-town non-union factory owner combined with the oft-displayed conviction that he's really so much above . . . well, petty small-town ignorance and bigotries; the deep-set opinion that Roosevelt ("his real name's Rosenfeld, I tell you!") is fucking up the country (still, even after 60 years); the self-loathing, approval-seeking, at best pseudo-satirical attitude toward the upper class, feigning contempt while at the same time knowing not to go too far -- like a dog who growls ferociously and tugs playfully at his master's sleeve while never, ever breaking the skin.
But where Mencken's style had a patina of originality and spunk, McNickle is cartoonishly imitative. I have not searched through all of McNickle's turgid output, but if he has not done so already, I guarantee that some day -- even without quoting Mencken -- he will once again find a way to use the word "mountebank" twice in the same column.