Roger Kimball wrote a bit on the Chosen One's Iraq-Iran-Economy speech, calling it dreadful. An erudite writer sent him a clipping from H. L. Mencken on a speech by President Warren G. Harding:

"of a string of wet sponges, it reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm (I was about to write abcess!) of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble, it is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash."

My brother gave me a signed first edition of a Mencken book. It's with my signed Buckley and O'Rourke, I had a signed copy of the Starr Report, signed by the author and by Ken Starr but it grew legs and walked away.