Site Ed. Note: The front page reports that American forces had taken the Japanese stronghold of Buna on the northern coast of the Papuan Peninsula of New Guinea. With Gona having fallen the previous week, two major irritants in the region were eliminated.

Sticky brown mud, resulting from heavy rains, which had begun falling days earlier, now impeded operations in Tunisia. Forces on each side were limited to air operations.

Mine fields stood in the way of quicker progress west for the British Eighth Army in pursuit of Rommel, each side again being limited to air activity for the nonce.

Undersecretary of War Robert Patterson told the Truman Committee that the Army was not attempting to form an industrial-military complex to take over control of the country. That, he said, comfortingly, was the job of the War Production Board.

Former Supreme Court Justice James Byrnes, now head of the Office of Economic Stabilization, was provided broader powers by President Roosevelt to resolve any disputes between food coordination efforts ordered implemented by Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard and other agencies of the government. Mr. Byrnes was, said an anonymous source, becoming more and more a sort of "Assistant President".

The historic 77^th Congress adjourned, after being in session for more days, 710, than any of its predecessors, through arguably the darkest sustained night of the country's entire history, save during the Civil War. It had begun at the beginning of 1941, facing the issue of whether to pass Lend-Lease; it had overseen the early stages of the draft call-up, authorized at the tail end of the 76^th Congress in the fall of 1940; it had been stymied by isolationist sentiment through its first eleven months, until the deadly attack on Pearl Harbor finally awakened its discordant elements to action; it had, without delay, granted President Roosevelt's requested Declarations of War, first on Japan on December 8, and then on Germany, December 11; it had presided over the first year of active warfare involving the United States, going from dark, depressing days of defeat and retreat in the Pacific, during the first five months of the war in that theater, to ostensibly better news with the Doolittle Raid April 18, followed by the apparent victory in the Battle of the Coral Sea in early May, trailing which a month later came the first indisputable victory at Midway in early June, the invasion of Guadalcanal in early August, the succession of blows dealt the enemy on Guadalcanal and on New Guinea since August, and capped by the crowning glory of the year, the landing of the Allied Expeditionary Force in North Africa on November 8, coordinated by General Eisenhower, in coordination with Generals Alexander and Montgomery approaching from El Alamein, and its quick securing of both Morocco and Algeria, its now having moved to within twenty miles of Tunis and about the same distance from Bizerte in Tunisia, while having just the previous week obtained the security of Dakar from the Vichy French garrison there.

A beginning had been made, through travails and disputes. Democracy, for all its stumbles, pitfalls, and pratfalls, was not as characterized by the biggest fools of all, Messrs. Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, a dying animal, giving way to the new order of tyrants and barbarism sweeping the world from callow youth to more sophisticated adult barbarians during the previous twenty years. It was neither an imperialist, hypocritical beast as portrayed; that was their own reflection in the mirror occluding reality. The Axis, in every theater, was ailing and on the run, now. And, moreover, production was now fully engaged and coordinated at every level, moving ahead at ever greater celerity to provide the fronts with materiel, while training of troops to be shipped overseas was running apace as time-stranded systems sought to choke the world from its daily bread while presenting themselves as the Wave of the Future.

From appearances, indeed, one might have gleaned just a hint that the war could well be finished in a dash of six months, perhaps, certainly within the year, especially given all the post-war talk abounding in the press.

But, despite the year's latter seven months of progress, these events would prove stubborn to meld into sufficiently widespread threat of survival through the Axis network to provoke surrender. The Axis, for all its troubles, would find a way to fight on for yet two and a half more years.

For now, however, the Congress, tired, no doubt, and diminished in any event in its power since the election which greatly reduced Democratic composition of both houses, most recently seen haggling over quorums and filibuster rights on the recently defeated measure seeking elimination of poll taxes in eight states of the former Confederacy, felt comfortable enough against any likely war emergency arising in the ensuing three weeks before the new Congress was set to take office January 6, to recess for the holidays.

And, as if the world weren't dark enough, a young woman who was reliant for her eyes on her seeing-eye Shepherd discovered that her dog had been shot by an intruder at the local YWCA the previous night. She was glad to find out, however, that within a little over a month she would be provided a new dog to replace Peg.

Just why it was that the dastardly act was ascribed to either a prowler or peeping tom, the story does not bother to impart. It appears more likely on the surface to be the result of some youngster with a gun who saw what he thought was a Nazi dog in the yard of the YWCA and decided therefore to prepare himself for inevitable war action to come, not realizing the utility of this particular dog.

Regardless of the motivation for taking the animal's life, we can empathize with the young lady's sense of loss. The other part of our story on Bogey was that a few months later, some of the children in the neighborhood in which we lived at the time presented to us a little puppy which they said was Bogey's offspring. And, the little puppy was quite friendly as was Bogey, and so, though the new little dog scarcely resembled Bogey, it was not ours to question his parentage. At least, he had no black stripe down his back. He did have, however, perhaps, as they informed, because of his having been bumped in the head by a horse not long after birth, a bad habit of chasing cars. So, it was that this friendly but feisty new little dog who hated automobiles met his Waterloo in the wheel well of one, scarcely 30 feet from where we were at the time working on our little blue roadster. Well, at least we know what happened to him. Done in by the internal combustion engine and his determination to put an end to this polluting, noisy predatory beast in his midst, once and for all. And very perspicacious he was. Not to be deterred, however, three days later, we bought ourselves a St. Bernard. He lived to the ripe old age of nine and died a natural death at home in bed.

On the editorial page, Samuel Grafton reminds readers that the country’s production of machine tools would increase by a factor of twenty between 1939 and 1943, that therefore any Congressmen still thinking in terms of 1939 were living in the distant past, that to cry "Wah! Wah!" about a larger bureaucracy than in World War I in such times was pure poppycock. "The man who discusses our public debt, for example, without adding that we have grown twenty years in two years, contributes precisely as much to public enlightenment as if he were drunkenly singing 'Sweet Adeline' under a lamppost." The country’s position in the world had been multiplied by manifold times in the previous two years, he points out. It was time for its citizens to reflect its new stature on the world stage.

Well, if you were leaning on a lamppost with folded arms, maybe a tramp, a bit scruffy, singing "Sweet Adeline" drunkenly in the rain, while perhaps being 'round to steal a car, and also crying "Wah! Wah!", as babies might wail, then your sound, as it was imparted from the apple garden full of gnomes, silent as it was in the pictures, might yet be full of venomous snakes nevertheless, your being human the while, after all.

So, we have to concede Mr. Grafton's point for its time as being true. But, likewise, we must question whether, post-war, all of that tooling should not have been curtailed, rather than exponentially increased to prime the fuse of the nuclear age in order to maintain and grossly increase the power of that venomous cockatrice whose eye once looked upon affords no man life thereafter to tell the tale.

And regardless of the answer, we must look to the future and our present peril in a world slowly drowning in its own ice meltdown, and ask whether we are not all just a little bit absurd. We worry about each nation's threat to us, each neighbor’s threat to us, each person on the street who might be brandishing a knife or gun to murder us--God help us! lock up all the dirty little bastards we don’t like--and yet are spending only a small fraction of this energy on combating this clear and present danger for which, if left unchecked, two generations hence, the babes of today will curse us for our overwhelming neglect, done to salve our own pocketbook worries, to enable continued regurgitation to the atmosphere of fossil fuel gases.

We are silly beings, individually and collectively, when boiled down to the essence. For this new war upon us is upon our very species and its continued right to exist on the planet which it has thus far in modernity turned into an irreconcilable mess. Yet, we do not spend but a fraction of our energy attempting any real change, denying the while the reality until the lap-lap of the sea comes slurping at our own doors.

And the inconsequential nobodies who wish to go about spewing their bile, outrageously without shame, overtly bribed by large corporations to do so at the expense of us all, indecorously brash, smiling daggers the while, to confute without basis this stark reality before us, the melting of the polar caps, to try to soothe the tender feelings of their followers who are abridged of any rational sense at all, merely looking to be told as children that things will be quite alright if we just all join hands and pray together, after driving their fossil fuel consuming SUV's to the prayer meetin', need especially to sit down with themselves and their consciences and look at what they are doin', not what their little prayer group soothin'ly tells 'em in their innocent little platitudes is just alright, dear, while pattin' 'em on the back and sayin' such things as: "Wow, a millionaire right here, and all over a little book. Oh, you are somethin', yes you are, aren't ye? You fooled 'em. Now don't you ever tell 'em how many times you had to watch 'Fargo' to perfect that little persona you got. Then, they might not like ye anymore. Good for you, though. They can't get their money back now, can they? You know, though, they are going to expect a sequel from ye. Let's see. Call it 'Goin' Rawhide'. That'll rake in the dough for sure, won't it now?"

Well, in any event, we seem to remember something about "Sweet Adeline" being sung in 1961--whether drunkenly or not, we don’t know. (Should you be unfamiliar with why that particular page popped up from 1961, we shall leave it to you, for your amusement and further edification, to ferret out. By the time you are done, you will understand much, we daresay. If you already know, don’t give away the secret.) Incidentally, when sung properly, we certainly have nothing against "Sweet Adeline". Remember to blame Mr. Grafton, not us, for that statement. We understand that Honey Fitz of Boston fame was the best at it.

"Rebellion" comments on the case of the unruly Sheriff and his despotic Deputy out of Burke County, detailing further that the story was centered on a war between red and white liquor interests, replete with payments of hush money and guards set upon guards. Whether the liquor over which they fought was named Rose, we don't know yet.

We suppose, though, that we are beginning to understand, in a much fuller sense than ever before, just, with particularity, why it was that Judge Sam J. Ervin was eventually named in 1973 to head a Senate Select Committee which investigated an almost identical scandal as that which arose out of his hometown in 1942. Have you ever?

As we indicated, we shall keep eyes piqued on this story as it develops further. Will the Sheriff ultimately be pardoned by his successor? How about Wilburn there? Oh, poor Wilburn probably will be the fall guy, should things hold true to pattern, we suppose. It always seems to be poor Wilburn in these stories who always winds up the patsy.

"The Trap" does not explain why the Japanese were drawn to the bait of the Solomons, probably something well understood in its time by most readers. The reason was to stop offensive operations from developing out of Australia into the East Indies and then further north. The Japanese had deemed it critical therefore to try to interdict the supply lanes between Hawaii and Australia, crucial to which scheme was the holding of Henderson Field on Guadalcanal. So, the cat laid the trap by taking the cheese from the hole and the mouse had little choice but to go for the bait or finally be captured by the cat’s paw reaching out into the darkness.

Dorothy Thompson writes the first of a series of pieces on the conflict between the Junker class in Germany and the Nazis as a political party, the inherent unease which the military had with Hitler and his minions, but which was ultimately enforced on penalty of death for failure to abide the Master’s Plan.

But, was it quite so simple as Ms. Thompson, who was in Germany in the early days of the Third Reich, suggests? In human terms, can any small cabal really have that much sway over the organs with the power of the military at their disposal? Was it not the fact that these military men were, while being perhaps of two minds on the worst bestial qualities displayed by the Nazi goons, not really but of slightly varying shades different? such that they could easily avert their eyes from atrocities and go their merry way to try to restore the manly dignity of Germany, emasculated by Versailles and the Armistice which led to it.

Raymond Clapper tells labor to get in line and watch its back. For the country in this war was not going to be any longer patient with labor disputes which disrupted production, that the new Congress would be no friend to the labor movement at all. He believed that the election was not such a groundswell of Old Guardism as to throw back the clock twenty years, but, nevertheless, change was bound to come from it, and in a direction which would not be supportive of 1933 policies, when the Depression was afoot, affecting everyone in the country adversely. Strikes for higher wages would be verboten.

Hitler and his pals were having their plain impact on democracy worldwide, if not so much by direct military action across the Atlantic as by stimulating, in their perfected Pavlovian technique well-studied out of their copybooks, the enforcement necessary to combat their military action abroad. It is one of the unfortunate components of World War II which has lived on in the democracies in varying degrees at certain times since 1945. The paranoia developed to avert a recurrent set of circumstances leading to a similar conflict, to extinguish the possibility of further fascist movements in the world, has often been inverted to produce that which, systemically anyway, it was designed to prevent--precisely because fascists got hold of its controls for a time.

Did we mention Watergate? And the military-industrial complex?