{"id":1408,"date":"2008-08-21T16:26:08","date_gmt":"2008-08-21T21:26:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1408"},"modified":"2008-08-21T16:28:58","modified_gmt":"2008-08-21T21:28:58","slug":"h-l-menken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/?p=1408","title":{"rendered":"H L Menken"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not quite this cynical but for those who have infinite faith in our elected School Board (or city councilors, county board members or legislators) here&#8217;s something to chew on.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;The government consists of a gang of men exactly like you and me. They have, taking one with another, no special talent for the business of government; they have only a talent for getting and holding office. Their principal device to that end is to search out groups who pant and pine for something they can&#8217;t get and to promise to give it to them. Nine times out of ten that promise is worth nothing. The tenth time is made good by looting A to satisfy B. In other words, government is a broker in pillage, and every election is sort of an advance auction sale of stolen goods.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Of course, having only won two out of 12 attempts at public office I suppose it is fair to say that I don&#8217;t have any particular talent for &#8220;getting or holding office.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p> &#8212; HL Mencken&#8211;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m not quite this cynical but for those who have infinite faith in our elected School Board (or city councilors, county board members or&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[80],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-red-plan"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lincolndemocrat.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}