The Charlotte News

Friday, January 21, 1938

SIX EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Speaking of unanimity in Red Square and this notoriously communistic concept of universal health care as that notorious communist, W. J. Cash, had the unmitigated temerity to suggest in the January 10, 1938 News, on the absurd premise that because our men and women who served in uniform get it, we all should, we are going to make some comments on all of that. Well, let us just tell you first a thing or two about that V.A. hospital health care, as just one prime example of how things would be should the government run the health care. Why, you would be lucky to get treated in thirty years for a simple cold there as it is, and you want the government to run health care for everyone? And speaking of these things--.

Now, look here, this recent documentary, "Sicko", by that, that Commie sympathizer, Socialistic propagandist, Roger fellow, yeah, Roger Moore, that's it. Now, look here, this guy goes over there to England and finds some Socialist propagandists to preach the merits of this socialistic medicine they've got. And how great and wonderful it all is and that everyone is covered free of charge and that they pay your transportation to and from the hospital. And that the doctors drive Audis and live in million dollar houses. And then he goes to France, France who refused to support us in the Great Patriotic Iraq War of '03, when we won a Great Victory in just five weeks, and finds the same sort of thing, that the government sends over someone to do the laundry for new mothers, and all kinds of paid vacation for maternity leave and all kinds of other things and this and that, and it's all free. Well, let us tell you a thing or two, commie Roger Moore: nothing is free, including our great country here. You have to pay for it. Freedom is never free. We saw that on a video game and it's true. Freedom is never free, buddy boy.

And then, then this sicko goes even further and goes to Canada--Canada! A bunch of Canuck pacifists, and just as with the Frogs and the Limeys, finds all this free, wonderful health care, just waiting, just waiting for a Communist takeover. And they all praise it and say it's wonderful and this and that. And it's all free. But just wait until Stalin moves in on them. Then they'll know what's free and what's not. We may give them a taste of their own medicine then, and not support them against the Communists, to serve them right for not supporting us in our wars to spread freedom and democracy against Communism and Terrorism.

And what's more, does Roger once discuss their tax rate to support all of this free stuff? He does not. Why, they probably tax their rich out the window, until they can barely afford to have four SUV's and a house of 25,000 square feet and three pools even with one heated in winter. Probably not even one pool. That's Communism for you. Why, either that, or we would be left with no defense budget at all, were we to give away all this stuff "free". And then the Communists would move in and take over.

But then the intolerable topper, the one move that he had to make finally, to show his truest allegiances, the mistake you finally made, Roger--Cuba. Cuba, mind you. He went to Cuba, even interviewed Che Guevara's daughter, and found their health care supposedly superior to that of the United States. Well, thank you, Roger Castro. Your Brother, Fidel, the Commie, has a superior health care system to ours. Well, then, Roger, why don't you just stay over there and live in Cuba!? Yeah, that's the place for you. Where you can buy those $120 medications for 5 cents; because you need some cheap medication (probably adulterated, anyway, laced with cocaine or strychnine or something). Because if you were to criticize El Presidente, you may disappear in the night, Roger. You remember that about your dear Cuba, you, you Kennedy Liberal, Commie sympathizer.

What, have you been asleep for the last 48 years or something? Cuba. Can you believe it?

Now, look here. Nothing is perfect. And, we know, we know, they gripe and they grouse about not getting enough health care, no treatment for the cancer, standing in line for months for the hospital catastrophic care and denial from insurance companies from perfectly responsible loopholes drawn in their policies to keep the board of directors and stockholders happy so that people will keep investing in America and buying stock and this and that, so we don't wind up in a depression again, like all the liberals want, and the high cost of premiums, until it all makes us sick just hearing all the pitiful, weepy, teary stories. Do like the guy at the opening of the film sewing up his own knee, and treat thyself. That's part of that Hippocritic oath we read about anyway: Heal Thyself!

Or, better, stay healthy and well and don't eat the junk food and smoke the cigarettes or breathe the air with the secondary smoke or drink the water or go swimming in the lakes and ponds of this great free land of ours, and you will stay well. We have the freedom to move to Norway, don't we?

And then they condemn the insurance industry trying to eek out an honest living and the drug companies and the HMO's, which that Great American, our Greatest President ever, President Nixon, ushered in back in 1971, because the Kaisers had the sense to come up with a concept whereby you pay the hospital not to have patients, kind of like paying governmental officials not to provide services. (Once we took our elderly neighbor, too lazy to drive himself, to Kaiser in the middle of the night because he said he was dying; then he collapsed in the lobby while they were doing the paperwork on him and lay there writhing on the floor gyrating like a top, trying to swallow his tongue, which we thought was kind of funny to watch, while everyone stood around not even paying attention to this funny show as it was obviously pretty commonplace there, but as soon as we called up a nurse, they took him back pronto into the doctor area, within about ten minutes anyway, and stabilized him, and miraculously, had him up walking within four hours and home by dawn, because when we asked that doctor whether they were going to keep him for observation overnight, he looked us right in the eye and said, without hesitation: "Are you kidding?" Now, that's American know-how and can-do optimism! None of this namby-pamby coddling, little baby stuff: "Oh does the poor li'l thing have a tummy ache?" And our elderly neighbor, he depended on Kaiser, and we took him there many times and they never, ever refused him care, until one day he went in for knee surgery in 2001, and then came out with pneumonia; but, they shipped him to a minimal care facility after about a week, where he died three weeks later of complications of the knee surgery. But he was 86 and you can't win them all, after all. One foot in the grave anyway. We mean, knee surgery, c'mon. You can't survive that and you're pretty bad off. Besides, he was a weak-kneed liberal all of his life.) That way, the Kaiser way, which became the pattern for all of our health care finally in the eighties, people learn not to be dependent on welfare and Medicare and Medicaid and all those Socialist programs that Roosevelt and Johnson came up with, to work for a living and stay healthy rather than this hand-out stuff where everything's Communistically provided free. You go in and you get treated and you go home, like it or not, and learn to Heal Thyself! And, besides, don't the insurance company people and the drug people and the HMO people have to eat and stay healthy, too? What about them?

What are you going to do, Roger, tax people with $500,000 salaries 50% of their income, so they can't even eat anymore at a decent five-star restaurant? Maybe reverse part of the capital gains tax reduction that Great Republican Congress brought us, to bring back the good old days when someone couldn't even sell a million dollar house without a huge tax bite on the profits if they didn't reinvest it within two years in other real property, just so's you could tax people good who were trying to make an honest buck by running people from their homes by spreading rumors about them, and then buying the place for a song, conspiring with the mortgage company to split the profits in exchange for tax help, giving it a coat of much needed paint and making a couple hundred thousand the smart way, capitalizing on the other slob's equity he squandered and lost, the loser, because he couldn't afford health care, oh boo-hoo, this and that, and all in four weeks, you make that money, the good old American way, like the late night tv commercials say to do, honestly, by the sweat of your brow, stooping to house-painting? Is that what you are trying to pull, Roger? Taking that away from hard-working people to reinstitute those punitive taxes to pay for your precious 46,000 without the gumption to have enough money to pay for health insurance because they squander their money on foolishness like a small house? What kind of country is that but Communistic?

No, we earn what we are worth, Roger. And a fellow who earns $500,000 or five million a year is worth every penny because he works for a living, not like some slob on an assembly line job earning cracker wages who can't even afford to keep his family in the hospital when they are injured or sick because he can't even afford insurance and the hospital wants $150,000 for the chemo-therapy. Well, boo-hoo. Another one bites the dust. Let those crackers fend for themselves.

This is the Greatest Country in the World, Roger, and you, you are just a sloganeering propagandist for Communism. We have the biggest of everything: the biggest state, the biggest buildings, the biggest homes, the biggest cars, the biggest hospitals, the biggest prisons; you name it, it's the biggest. We like Paul Bunyan Big. That's why we like Big Business and Big HMO's and Big Insurance companies, and Big drug companies who fend for themselves by juggling molecules to reinstitute patents about to expire so the drugs don't become those cheap generics which are probably adulterated with strychnine or something. Because this is America. And America is Free, Roger. We don't need free health care because we are free. And that means free to cheat, steal, lie, gouge, and kill, if necessary, to get our way about things, because we are America and free.

Not like Norway where you took your cameras to show how they coddle criminals and supposedly have the lowest crime rate in the world with their country club spa prisons which claim to rehabilitate by fostering dignity, self-reliance, and self-respect. What a joke! Yeah, they have fewer criminals. You know why? Well, we'll tell you why: because the rats ate them all. That's right, those Norwegian rats. That was Norway's contribution to civilization. Thank you, Mr. Norwegian. You know that's true, Roger, and yet you cover it up in favor of more of your Communist-Socialist propaganda. Well, if it's not true, why did they call them Norwegian rats, Roger. Answer that one, buster!

Well, we recommend that you watch "Sicko", not because it's a good or honest film about our health care industry, the best in the world ever, but rather just so you can be revolted as we were by this cheap propaganda crusade against America and its supremely perfect health care system and which taught the rest of the world how to cure its diseases, the best by far in the entire world, even if some Commie propaganda sheet did rank it 37th. But don't fall for it, this film, whatever you do. Just remember that Roger is an agent of Russia and cleverly has ways to manipulate you, the viewer, with those special effects things they do out in Hollywood--like with the fake blood and all that. Just look on it as a training film for spotting that Communist propaganda.

And, also, when you're done, you can have some laughs by seeing how those radical Democrats, nay, Communists, in the person of John Conyers, among others, (who helped get our Greatest President in 1974, as part of that Communistic Judiciary Committee in those days, all over that second-rate burglary, no, we mean third-rate burglary), who are trying to pass a bill, H.R. 676, to bring about universal health care coverage, like those Commie countries have. Well, dream on, Commies! That Roger Moore really suckered you in easily enough, didn't he? One little movie and you're falling over backwards to be like Castro in Cuba. Just like a Liberal Democrat.

We shall fight to keep our hospitals free, free of doctors, free of patients and free of your Commie infiltration to make them free. For that is the American way! We are free! But our health care costs us out our pajamas, as it should be!

Without Filibusters

As nearly as we can make it out, the millenium has at length arrived in Russia. The first parliament under the new constitution has just closed after a session of only eight days. But it is not the marvelous brevity of the session which intrigues us, so much as the unexampled unanimity which distinguished it. Thus--

The members of the parliament unanimously thumbed their noses at Japan.

They unanimously promised a licking to anybody who might feel up to attacking Russia.

They unanimously paraded by the tomb of Lenin in Red Square, unanimously cheering.

They unanimously "accepted" a new Council of Commissars proposed by Josef Stalin.

So unanimous were they, indeed, that there was not a single piece of legislation proposed by anybody.

All of which seems to argue that the new Constitution, described by Comrade Stalin as "the most truly democratic in the world," is practically magical.

Mrs. Grundy in Virginia

Maybe Old Doc Thomas Ely, of Jonesboro, Va., is only trying to regulate the traffic. But unless we have suddenly come down with a double case of cock-eye, those are the features of Mrs. Grundy we discern behind his bill to levy fines of up to twenty-five smackers on any male and female, not lawfully wedded or bound to each other by blood ties, who stop a car along Virginia roads to look at the stars after nine o'clock of an evening.

She's a very ancient gal, that Mrs. Grundy, and like certain other celebrated people, she will never learn a blamed thing. It is of record on the high authority of a gentleman who resides on Monument Avenue in Richmond in this same state of Virginia, that she was emitting her disapproving sniffs and trying to pass a law so long ago as the morning when Florian de Puysange rode forth along the roads of Poictesme and somewhere short of Storisende met a maid with whom the gods had not dealt unkindly. And it is of record, too, for Florian's posterity to examine, that all that ever came of this Mrs. Grundy's efforts was a lot of giggles.

But by that token, of course, the old girl doesn't much matter. Old Doc Ely may or may not get his law. In either case, we opine, the attentive ear will still be able to hear in Virginia on Summer evenings--and Winter evenings--and Autumn evenings--and Spring evenings--the sound of kisses and whispers and soft laughter...

Circumstances Alter Cases

Some of the bitterest complaints of the case and the frequency with which convicts escape from prison have come from police officers. And no wonder, for as surely as it was an escaped convict who caused the trouble again, police officers had to bear the brunt of dealing with a hardened offender and a desperate man. But circumstances, as we have captioned this piece, alter cases.

For example, it was Detective Chief Frank Littlejohn, one of the most acidulous protestants on the subject of escaped convicts, who went all the way up to Harrisburg, Pa., this week to bespeak of parole for an escaped convict who had been recaptured. And that the fellow in his several years of unauthorized freedom had not led an entirely blameless life is shown by the fact that he was taken in tow again on a charge of driving drunk. That's how it was discovered that Paul Cathan, the Sunday school teacher of Rockingham, and Kenneth Reed, the escaped convict from Pennsylvania, was one and the same person.

Even so, as Chief Littlejohn, we hope he gets his parole. He appears to have reformed, and during the process he has taken on wife and child and a respectable position in another community. But the incident of a police officer's pleading for the parole of an escaped convict ought to appeal to North Carolina's parole commissioner, Edwin Gill. It's different, isn't it, Ed, when you see these applicants for parole face to face in all their humility, with their supplicating innocent families to clinch the argument?

Abandonment of Mr. Willkie*

Mr. Wendell Willkie, president of Commonwealth & Southern, is a glutton for the hair of the dog that bit him. Having fought all the way up to the Supreme Court against Federal loans and gifts to municipalities for power plants, and having learned at the last that the court could find no reason to grant him relief, he turns around and proposes either that the Federal Government buy out his properties in the Tennessee Valley or that the money be advanced to the states in the area to enable them to buy him out.

Mr. Willkie is hardly to be censured for his willingness to sell out to a competitor that is all-powerful, that makes the laws by which private utilities must be governed, that builds publicly-owned power plants with the money that it raises in part from heavy taxes on privately-owned utilities. But more than the redemption of investments in Commonwealth & Southern is involved in Mr. Wilkie's proposition. Its acceptance by the Government on either of his terms would mean, ultimately, government ownership of all utilities. And we doubt exceedingly that the country cares to adopt any such policy merely as an expedient to save Commonwealth & Southern stockholders from harm.

Mr. Willkie's outfit has been the goat, it is true, of a nebulous and impulsive Federal power policy--or lack of policy. We feel sorry for Mr. Willkie. At the same time, business is business; and the business primarily in hand at this juncture is not to put the Federal Government all the way into the power business for the sake of a relatively few injured stockholders, but to keep it out for the sake of private initiative. Mr. Willkie, in short, for all of us, may stew.

The Case of Dean Noe

It's a queer thing that organized society, which is to say the state, oftentimes steps in and forcibly provides medical attention for ill children whose parents are opposed on religious scruple to medical treatment, or puts away where he can do no harm some demented soul with a mania for injuring himself, or collars a would-be suicide to keep him from taking his life--it's a queer thing, we say, that organized society, which is to say the state, will go so far to save its distressed wards from themselves, yet will stand by and permit an obviously ill mind such as Dean Noe's publicly and excruciatingly to destroy itself and the body that nourishes it.

It cannot be argued that the state hangs back out of fearful respect for a man's religious fervor, for it sensibly interferes in such affairs where lower orders of intelligence are involved. And the church itself--well, the church has come a long way in respect for the individual since those dark ages when a suicide had his body staked to the unhallowed ground of a public roadway, his goods confiscated. But it still is debatable that the church has no right to interfere when one of its officers sets out to consume himself by starvation.

And the plain fact, as set forth in the letter to Dean Noe yesterday, by his Bishop, removing him from the Deanship of St. Mary's Cathedral, is that the fasting cleric is not at present his "normal self." Whether the state or the church owes it to this poor man and his family to intervene and forcibly to treat his abnormality is a question that a thousand precedents answer in the affirmative.

Study in Immediacy*

President Roosevelt, reaffirming his support of legislation for extension of the civil service system, said today that the establishment of a sound personnel program was "one of the most important constructive steps in the improvement of government administration today."

That from an Associated Press dispatch of Wednesday, January 19, in this year of 1938.

And this from the Democratic platform of Friday, June 26, 1936:

We pledge the immediate [Italics ours] extension of the merit system through the classified civil service to all non-policy-making positions in the Federal service.

To which we add that, as nearly as our memories serve us, this is approximately the one hundred and forty-third time the President has made the same speech recorded at the top of this editorial.

And with that before us, we go on to record that when the platform plank quoted was adopted, about 300,000 of 800,000 "non-policy-making" employees of the Federal Government were not under civil service. To record also that on Wednesday, January 19, 1938, about 325,000 of the 825,000 "non-policy-making" employees of the Federal Government were not under civil service. And to conclude that, in all likelihood, when 1941 comes around, about 375,000 of the 875,000 "non-policy-making" employees of the Federal Government will not be under civil service.

Site Ed. Note: The rest of the Commie page is here.

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