The Charlotte News

Friday, November 20, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Incidentally, if you are having difficulty with the front page and editorial page not wanting to open, it is not our fault. Explorer 8 and Adobe 9 do not seem to like one another without an adjustment in the Adobe. So, open the Adobe, go to "Preferences" on the "Edit" tab, click "Internet" from the list, and then uncheck the box beside, "Allow speculative downloading in the background," or, if that fails in remedy, uncheck the box which is beside, "Display PDF in browser." Or, download version 9.2 at the Adobe. Everything will be copacetic again. Someone in the Adobe was apparently engaged in quite a lot of speculative downloading of something in the background the day they were programming this particular version.

The British had taken Bengazi from the Axis, the front page reports, and for the third time, hoping it to be the charm.

The Russians were beginning yet another winter counter-offensive to good effect against the Nazis in the Caucasus, frustrating thereby the Nazis' critical need for ever increasingly precious oil.

Former Marine Corps Commandant Maj.-General John A. Lejeune died in Baltimore at age 73. Shortly afterward, the recently opened New River Marine base in eastern North Carolina would bear his name.

Otherwise, we echo the sentiment of the terse but honest communique issued by General Eisenhower’s headquarters: “There is nothing new to report.”

In “Fireball”, on the editorial page, comes the first mention of George Patton, lifting the General already to statuary status before he had accomplished yet much of anything in the war. It remarks of his two pearl-handled revolvers strapped to his hips, his traveling, daring death, ahead of his men to the battle front, and his renowned, teeth-gritted verbal lashings of the Nazis, so profane in one instance at Fort Bragg during a speech to the troops of the Ninth Infantry Division that the ladies had to be ushered out by the MP’s to avoid having their ears burned by the verbal slaps. The piece concludes that he was the new “Billy the Kid in a tank”.

Well, we didn’t call those Nazi sons-of-bitches sons of bitches for goddamned nothing on Monday. Patton had arrived on the scene the previous week. Expect the unexpected.

“No Change” puts the spotlight again on Senator Robert Rice Reynolds, reporting of his having inserted into the Congressional Record excerpts of an Italian propagandist tract spewing anti-Semitic bile. When it was caught by The Hour and publicized, Senator Reynolds admitted the charge but remained the Neanderthal so long his habit, saying he would put it all in the record again, “every damn word of it”, as he called The Hour a "yellow dog backhouse sheet".

Senator Reynolds and General Patton should have gotten together in a room and had some splendid intercourse between them to determine who could be the coarser, the one given to overt profanity, or the other, Bob, only to slightly covert racism and ethnicism. Which is the worse? We think the latter; the former is nothing for anyone but the latter little prigs usually to get hung up about.

There is a well-known case, incidentally, under Due Process rights and the Sixth Amendment right to present evidence and confront and cross-examine adverse witnesses, including the right to challenge physical evidence, regarding the requirement that the prosecution in a criminal case preserve its evidence for observation and testing by the defense to insure these rights; in this instance, for better or worse, the requirement having been relaxed for practical reasons, that the sought evidence was not deemed sufficiently probable of exculpation and because of the reliability of a scientific test, providing other comparable evidence alternative to that being sought: California v. Trombetta, 467 US 479 (1984)... Italian propaganda? Oh, 1984.

Ah yes, one little vial of expatiated, inculpatious breath, from Madame Rue...

An abstract of the Congressional Record reports an uneasy colloquy between Senator Alben Barkley of Kentucky, presiding over the recorded Senate sesssion as Majority Leader, and Senator Richard Russell, Democrat of Georgia, regarding the objection of Senator Russell to the fact of there not being a sufficient quorum for business to be hatched, that is conducted. That which is not spoken was that the reason for the contentious interchange was the order of business to be put before the Senate, the anti-poll tax legislation, not that the requisite percentage of members for proceeding with the daily business were not present, often enough the case.

That, as Paul Mallon reports African-Americans, shoveling dirt for dead men, laid down their toilsome implements and took up their rifles to fight the Japanese invading at Milne Bay on New Guinea in July.

Good boys 'nough to fight, but votin's sumpin' diff'rent down heya.

Anyway, if the page was sent to Patton in North Africa to read, as it might well have been, he need only have read the Congressional Record excerpt to have fulfilled his quota for the goddamned day.

And so have we.

Now, the M.P.’s may come in and clear the room of the tender-eyed.

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