The Charlotte News

Wednesday, November 5, 1941

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: First, if you were trying to locate in the Bible yesterday's Bible quote of the day, the passage citation was misstated: it is actually Isaiah 65:17, not 67:17 which does not exist. Regardless of the citation, we have to find interesting the coincidence with yesterday's historic election.

We wish to thank both presidential candidates for a basically good and clean race this time around, and for even better speeches last night. Both the acceptance speech by President-elect Obama and the concession speech of Senator McCain were among the finest of their sort ever provided by candidates on election night in our memory.

We hope it forebodes well something fresh on the American landscape. The American people deserve a break from all the dreariness of the last eight years--and it has been plentifully dreary for most Americans, a time which will be best forgotten by most who have suffered through it. The three or five percent at the top of the economic ladder who didn't suffer need a lesson in compassion and understanding, we suggest, like never before in recent history.

And, we venture that the little piece from The Daily Tar Heel on the page today to the far right, below the Clapper piece on the need for control of Dutch East Indies commodities, turns out somewhat prophetic, even if we don't quite discern it as a racial issue. Cancer does not respect racial lines.

"Scenario" missed its prediction that the torpedoing of the Kearny would be recorded as the first incident of the war involving U.S. loss of life. While technically it was, with ten dead, the Reuben James of course then eclipsed that. But then Pearl Harbor eclipsed everything and laid its stake indelibly on the American memory. But this fact they yet did not know on November 5.

Finally: "A pastry-cook/ That made good pigeon-pie of rook/ Cut venison from Yorkshire hogs." (You have to figure out why we include these three lines.)

Some days, it's just more fun around here than connecting the dots on the HoJo menu during breakfast.

Incidentally, we happened to tune in today to the Rushing Lamebrain show for the first time in some ten years or more. It was purely happenstance, but there he was, blabbier than ever. We thought he was already gone with the wind. And, from the sound of it today, he is. He's already at it, denouncing the new President just as he did to President Clinton the day after his election lo these many, many decades ago, back in the Forties was it? But the memory resounds all too freshly. His callers, as usual, were carping away in their creepy little voices. The whole program was about race. Why not? When you are a racist, why not criticize the newcomer for his race and claim that his "entire campaign was about race, folks"? Such is akin to the Rushing Lamebrain claiming that his entire radio career has been based on an appeal to high ideals, intellectual discourse, and geometric dialectic.

One thing we simply don't understand about talk radio: why are they all neo-Nazis? They call it "conservatism", but it is all really just neo-Nazism.

When do we get over that and realize that we were founded as a liberal country, that if we are proud Americans truly, we are proud to be liberal and to have a liberal heritage, that we fought several wars to instill and preserve those liberal values in ourselves and in others, and to destroy fascism and Nazism, which is at times not far from being synonymous with the neo-conservative movement, especially insofar as the Nazis and Fascists within it. That movement, for the nonce at least, is now officially dead as a doornail. And let us hope that it does not become the undead. Good riddance, and the sooner they get Rushing Lamebrain and all of his pals off the airwaves, or at least give equal time to some who espouse liberal values on those airwaves, as they don't on these Nazi stations who carry these freaks, the better off we all will be. They truly stimulate the worst in all of us. And they are, from what we may gather, neo-Nazis, as are their regular listeners who sap it all up like they do watermelon on a hot summer day. Anyway--and duly noting that the great trouble these days, and for some time now, with the Republican Party is just this sort of affinity within it for issues with appeal to these neo-Nazis--, repeating the toast of the Green Beret standing at the bar in the scene in that film about the hunt for venison, we say to Mr. Lamebrain and his pals...