Angel of truth and justice H.L. Mencken rises from the grave to beat down Sen. Zell Miller:

"If the fellow was sincere, then so was P.T. Barnum. The word is disgraced and degraded by such uses. He was, in fact, a charlatan, a mountebank, a zany without any shame or dignity. What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition - the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb into their eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits against their betters, that he himself might shine."

The whole thing is here. An excerpt:

Anno 1925, H.L. Mencken penned those uncharitable words about William Jennings Bryan after the letter exited both his public career and the realm of the animate. Anno 2004, as the Hon. Zell Miller, senior Senator from Georgia, approaches the end of his public career, the nation - or at least that portion of it that still possesses of a sense of irony - wishes the Sage of Baltimore could be living at this hour, so as to properly limn the life and works of this latest personification of a recurring American archetype: the country-fried demagogue.