Site Ed. Note: …And, though quite importunate, yet, not o’erweened. Lo, that she be given to quibus, and much, by any other name, asise, lest it be o’erstated, not the least o’er-rebused, nor o’er-capsized.

Let’s play Concentration:

"Money Votes" demonstrates that huge relative expenditures for political campaigns is nothing new, extending back to the time in 1912 when campaign expenditures were first required to be disclosed in presidential elections, (that at a time when Senators were elected still by the state legislatures). We see yesterday by The New York Times, however, that House Republicans as a body are flat broke, while Democrats are flush, and individual fund raising among House Republicans fares little better vis à vis Democrats. The theme is pretty much repeated in the Senate. As for the presidential race, the top two money raisers for the Democrats, Senators Clinton and Obama, are far ahead of the top two Republicans, Governor Romney and Mr. Giuliani, by a margin of nearly 3 to 2 in total money raised, and by over 2 to 1 in cash on hand. It appears there is disquiet in the land toward current Republican policies.

We venture that the case is not helped much when the President says we must stay the course in Iraq because had we done so in Vietnam…

Well, had we, what of it? Assuming for the moment that the country would have tolerated it without coming to actual revolution—a state nearly realized as it was, and for plentifully good reason at the time—then what good would have been achieved in Vietnam for another 10,000 killed added to the 58,000 Americans who died there—another 20,000, 30,000, two years, three, five? As it was, Vietnam was the longest sustained war in the country’s history, over eight years--not counting the seven years before that during which the country sent thousands of military advisors to the torn country, torn by nearly a century of empire quest, first by the French, then the Japanese, again the French, the British, and finally by our own involvement, all to end the quest by some peasants for self-rule of a rice paddy. Setting aside the Revolution, our second longest war is the Civil War, four years. The country historically has limited patience with warfare, even during World War II, depictions and memories more often than not related after the fact to the contrary notwithstanding. And for an even longer sustained effort in Vietnam, would we have suffered more acutely as a nation, as we did in its immediate aftermath and continuing for well over a decade, the type of economic decline that the Soviet Union had in the wake of its prolonged war in Afghanistan?--that which ultimately, together with glasnost and perestroika, the determined efforts of Mr. Waiesa, Mr. Havel and others within the Soviet satellites, led to the end of the Soviet regime, primarily from the slow decay of infrastructure and morale from within resulting from a society built on lines of strict militarization and its always consequent limits to freedom accompanying it. To what end would longer involvement in Vietnam have led? Would we today, for such a longer effort, be known as simply the States of America, formerly united?

Decades of adjustment to quell centuries-old tribal-religious internecine conflict inevitably lie ahead for Iraq. We venture that, having bombed much of their country back to Babylon, we may only be inhibiting the start of that process, not fostering it. And the longer we stay, to our own domestic neglect and ever-decreasing morale at home.

Day before yesterday, we set down these lines, to coincide with an earlier note:

Should Elizabeth Dilling, Martin Dies
Only be willing from red to free our skies
As Barton did the lines melt ‘way;
So, too, the latter day’s belt-say,
Then we might be prosperous yet,
Despite many miles of foggy-bottomed regret.

We didn't like it much and so decided to leave it out of the note. Then, yesterday, we saw by The Washington Post that the Greenbelt Road bridge over the Baltimore-Washington Parkway in Greenbelt, Maryland, both major commuter roads for the District, had decayed from road salts, causing bits of concrete to fall from the bridge onto the roadway below, exposing corroding reinforcing steel beneath the overpass. The roads, both under Federal jurisdiction, were closed for a few hours, the concrete cleaned up, and some repair effected. It is a small item, but emblematic of the overall problem, starkly set forth in Minneapolis-St. Paul three weeks ago.

We can only hope that you are not among the hapless D.C. commuters when, not through any act of Terror, but simply our own self-neglect for chasing mindlessly Terror around the globe, creating in the process yet more, and for decades since the end of World War II, while equally mindlessly abandoning our more natural concerns, if freed that is from our collective compulsive neurosis, in exchange for mindless traffic jams and commute to and fro the sunburned suburbs and the city, escaping, escaping our collective neurosis, Fear, and its resulting greenhouse gases ever building, some other bridge collapses beneath that mindless sojourn from Fear to some mindless job plotting how to conquer the Terrorists among us generating that Fear.

Take the gasahog, Fearful One, and junk it. Its days are coming fast to an end, your mindless war on Terror for more oil notwithstanding.

"As A Sheep--" explains the problem facing the Allies and neutrals in forming a united front to combat Hitler and Mussolini, that the issue was not cowardice, as the United States was equally guilty of whatever it was which produced the reticence to fight, but rather a lack of resolve to unite and take a stand against the jackals, as they slowly by stealth ate away each nation by piecemeal, eroding the foundations of their economy by interrupting and co-opting for themselves commerce in trade while reducing morale at the same time, forcing ultimately acquiescence.

All of that would change.

"Not Enough" and "Whipping Post" are of a piece, perhaps, in suggesting that cruelty of the sort displayed in Klan activity was never confined merely to the South, but could infect even officialdom in the states deemed by historical reputation most civilized, as well. Then again, Delaware is sometimes included in sociological surveys of the South.

And we note that James Ford Seale, a Klansman convicted in June in Mississippi on Federal charges of kidnapping and conspiracy to commit kidnapping in the brutal murders of two 19-year old men on Saturday, May 2, 1964, Henry Dee and Charles Moore, was properly sentenced yesterday to three life terms. At age 72, suffering from cancer, he isn’t likely to see freedom again. The young men he helped to kill, however, never even saw the age of twenty. Today, had they never encountered Mr. Seale and his white trash pals that May evening on their way to a dance, they would both be 62.

Instead, they were taken at the point of Seale’s shotgun into a dark national forest, beaten, placed half conscious in the trunk of a car, driven a hundred miles to Tallulah, La., there had an engine block and train rail strapped to their necks for weight, and were then tossed into the Mississippi, still alive; their bodies were found two months later during the search for the three missing civil rights workers out of Philadelphia.

You will recall that "Preacher" Edgar Ray Killen, an ordained Baptist minister, was finally convicted just two years ago, on the 41^st anniversary of the deed, June 21, 2005, on a voluntary manslaughter lesser included offense and sentenced by the trial judge to the maximum available sentence, 60 years in prison, after a trial on state murder charges, the first on state murder charges in the murders of Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman, and Mr. Schwerner.

Not dissimilarly, in the murders of Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore, one of the accomplices, who obtained immunity in exchange for damning testimony against Seale, was a church deacon.

As we have pointed out before, and as Cash did regularly, a great leaping claim to be partial to the Almighty has, since its founding in the wake of the Civil War, been a tenet of the Klan.

With blood on their hands, there is great need for forgiveness, not only for the convicted but also for the accomplices who turned, a type of forgiveness which those of the murderous breed may only expect fully on the other side of that river into which they tossed Mr. Dee and Mr. Moore on that spring night of 1964.

Klan Needs More Than Merely Removing Masks

The Ku Klux Klan boss in Atlanta, Wizard James A. Colescott, has been embarrassed more and more by the indictment of seventeen Kluckers of Fulton County for murder and assaults.

First he protested loudly that nobody ever went out in the Klan guise to whip and to kill with Klan approval. Then he ordered the local in whose territory the murder was committed to turn in all uniforms. And now he has gone off the deep end in his effort to placate decent public opinion and surrendered on a point on which the Klan has always been obdurate--has issued orders to all Klansmen everywhere not to appear in public or private in the Hoodlum Mask, and to burn crosses and parade only with permission of the district chieftains.

But it is still not enough. And it would not have been enough if he had gone all the way and interdicted Klan parades and the burning of crosses altogether--both of which are never intended for any other purpose than intimidation. To merit the tolerance of decent men, the outfit would have to get itself a whole new set of principles.

The Boys With Heaviest War Chests Usually Win

It cost the Republicans nearly nine million dollars to try to elect Alf Landon in 1936. Or to be exact, $8,892,792. That comes to $4,446,486 each for Maine and Vermont, with their puny eight electoral votes. In the same election the Democrats got 46 states for $5,194,741.

Which may seem to suggest that money has very little to do with the outcome of national elections. But in point of fact, the story is quite different.

It is only since 1912 that the law has required political parties to report campaign expenditures. But in that period, the Presidential candidate for whom most money was spent has won save the 1936,1932, and 1916.

Expenditure for Wilson in 1916, as for Roosevelt in 1932, was only a few hundred thousand dollars smaller than that for the Republican rivals. In 1916, again, the case was exceptionally complicated by the slogan, "He Kept Us Out Of War." And in 1932 by the fact that Mr. Hoover couldn't have been re-elected if he had had the field to himself.

How important money actually is in determining the probable outcome of these elections may be seen from the fact that the expenditures have advanced by leaps and bounds. In 1912, the two parties spent less than $3,000,000. In 1916, they spent nearly $5,000,000. The Harding-Cox fight cost nearly $7, 000,000, the Davis-Coolidge go a little less, and the Hoover-Smith battle over $11,500,000. The fat cats closed up tight the lean year of 1932, and the war chests only totaled $5,146,027. But in 1936 they rose to the staggering sum of $14,087,713.

This Logic Leads Straight Back To The Torturer

It may be that Governor Richard C. McMullen, of Delaware, proves too much.

In that state, a vigorous movement has developed for the abolition of the whipping post, a form of punishing criminals no longer practiced anywhere else in America, and in only the most backward portions of the Western World generally. But Governor McMullen is militantly for the whipping post, saying:

Whether the whipping post actually deters crime better than other forms of punishment may well be doubted. When England hanged pickpockets, it was the usual thing for pickpockets to ply their trade in the crowd each time a criminal was hanged at Tyburn. And when the number of hanging crimes in that country was cut down from well over a hundred to a few, crime did not increase but decreased.

Nor has Delaware any very good record in the crime reports of the FBI. Her neighbors, Pennsylvania and Maryland, both have far better ones, save in the matter of murder, which hardly would be punished by whipping.

But if you assume that whipping, because of its great painfulness and indignity, does deter crime, then by the Governor's logic that anything which deters crime is a good thing, the tortures of the Middle Ages might be argued to be good things also. Certainly, they were more painful and terrifying.

The Neutrals Play Exactly The Game Hitler Wants

The five small countries--Sweden, Rumania, Holland, Belgium, and Hungary--which stand next on the list of Nazi victims have armies totaling 4,000,000 men. Behind some of them lie other countries which are also on the list of appointed victims, like Yugoslavia and Greece, which can raise the total to 5,000,000. Add Turkey and you have 7,000,000. Add the forces which the Allies presently have in the field and you probably have in the vicinity of 11,000,000 soldiers.

If all these struck Germany at once, could there be any rational doubt about the outcome? It is impossible to believe it, even though some of these troops are imperfectly armed and imperfectly trained. If Germany had to face such a combination acting together, she would inevitably have to distribute her troops to so many fronts that a breakthrough on one of them would be certain.

There is the possibility of course that Russia and Italy might come to her aid. But that possibility goes down in exact proportion as the numbers in Nazi Germany shows increase and as the probability of her defeat rises. Both these nations are playing the part of jackals, and propose to join Germany only by way of being in at the kill--are not likely to join if the kill becomes virtually impossible.

That Adolf Hitler does intend to grab all these nations is as certain as anything in this world can be. He himself long ago promised us as much, and every act of his career testifies that he meant every word of it.

Yet we find every one of the intended victims playing the part of frightened rabbits caught in their nests, and dumbly waiting for the hand of the aggressor to descend--so paralyzed by fear that they go on busily pretending to think it entirely possible for them to be neutral in face of plain fact that it isn't.

Every last one of them knows well its one chance to survive is for the Allies to win the war. Yet by their tactics they enable the Nazis to seize them by piecemeal, to cancel out the fact of the British blockade for long periods at least by seizing all their products and shutting them off from Britain, to break down their armies, block them from aid to the Allies in the common cause, and turn them instead into labor battalions for the oppressor.

Is this deliberately calculated on the basis of the notion that the Allies will ultimately win anyhow and restore them without the necessity of their having to shed their own blood? If so it does them little credit. And moreover it is exceedingly foolish--since it makes the defeat of the Allies always more likely.

It is necessary not to be Pharisaical about them, of course. The "let's avoid a fight at any cost" psychology is plainly in evidence in America, too. And it is in all truth a dreadful choice they face. Moreover, the sluggishness of the Allies has certainly made it harder still to make.

Nevertheless, the choice is there and cannot be avoided. The choice which the Thirteen Colonies faced in 1775-76 was a dreadful one, too; and there were those in the colonies not immediately menaced who wanted to avoid making a united front. But in the showdown there was resolution enough to override fear in the name of common sense. Such resolution is ominously wanting in the whole world at present.