In 1915, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) delivered a harsh verdict on the politics of his time which applies even more forcefully to our political culture in 2018. Mencken said politics had become an “endless saturnalia of bunk, of bluff, of stupidity, of insincerity, of false virtue, of nonsense, of pretense, of sophistry, of paralogy, of bamboozlement, of actorial posturing, of strident wind music, of empty words—even, at times, of down-right fraud.”