Here's a fascinating little George Will aside from his shockingly competent, though predictably selective, column today about the extraordinary banality of this season's Republican presidential crop:
[Eugene] Debs ran [for the presidency] in 1900, 1904, 1908 and 1912, and in 1920 from prison, where the progressive Woodrow Wilson administration had sent him for violating the Espionage Act by speaking against World War I. (President Warren Harding, who is as despised by today’s progressive intelligentsia as Wilson is adored, commuted Debs’s sentence and invited him to the White House.)
And here's H.L. Mencken, on Debs, Wilson, and ... :
Confronted, on his death-bed, with the case of poor Debs, all his instincts compelled him to keep Debs in jail. I daresay that, as a purely logical matter, he saw clearly that the old fellow ought to be turned loose; certainly he must have known that Washington would not have hesitated, or Lincoln. But Calvinism triumphed as his intellectual faculties decayed. In the full bloom of health, with a plug hat on his head, he aped the gentry of his wistful adoration very cleverly, but lying in bed, stripped like Thackeray's Louis XIV, he reverted to his congenital Puritanism, which is to say, bounderism.
In the introductory ellipsis above one is tempted to insert "Will," for who else today radiates the same decaying intellect, the same triumphant Calvinism, the selfsame congenital Puritanism as once had by Woodrow Wilson as the bounderish George F. Will?
But, gentle Sir, and dear Madam, this is mere humbug on my part. Thus I shall end instead as does Will: Merry Christmas.