for yourself why his readers love him and his targets wish he were almost anywhere else. One of the guiding principles of the column for Steve Lopez is: "H. L. Mencken once described his mission as a journalist this way: Confort the afflicted, afflict the confortable. Obviously, my goal hasn't been that noble, or even close to it. Sometimes the idea was just to tell a story, or have some fun. But the Mecken line has been something of a guiding principle for me. So has the idea that a column be a tool against ignorance and hyprocrisy, whether written from a street corner in Philadelphia, the halls of Congress, or a battlefield in Bosnia. Part of what a column should do, it seems to me, is hold people up to their potential. To remind them not just what it is, but what can be."

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