The Charlotte News

Friday, December 4, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: While on the subject of fascists and fascism, we ran across today an article about the new "Conservapedia", an online encyclopedia dedicated to Conservatives, prepared by readers, similar to Wicked-pedia.

After reading a few entries, we shall dub it, henceforth, Canswervapedia.

A couple of examples are the entries we sampled for John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Because it is unnecessary, we admit not reading in careful detail either lengthy account. We have a fair understanding of each subject already and do not need further education from Canswervapedia, or Wicked-pedia, though we always remain willing to be enlightened anew by primary resources laid forth in the context of their times and their overall substance. But that takes a little time and dedicated scholarship, that which the Canswervers and Wickeders obviously are not in sufficient possession of their wits to undertake from within the mental institution where most of them obviously spend much or all of their time, even if on home furlough.

We got the gist of the Swerve fairly quickly without much expenditure of time.

The first paragraph of the Kennedy entry contains the incredible statement: "He did not accomplish a great deal while alive, but after his assassination he became a legendary figure in whom admirers saw the ideals of American mythology incarnated."

Hmmm. Didn't accomplish a great deal while alive? Why, of course not. He only saved the entire planet from nuclear holocaust in October, 1962, promulgated to the Congress the first broad-sweeping civil rights bill, covering all public accommodations affecting interstate commerce, hotels, restaurants, theaters, etc., which eventually became the Civil Rights Act of 1964, set the tone for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, used the power of the Federal government to insure obedience to the law by insuring peaceful integration of public universities in the South--even if not uniquely so, for Eisenhower had also done so with respect to the public school integration in Little Rock in 1957--and also obtained the first Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, thereby setting the country on the course which eventually led to the SALT treaties. He also, of course, established Vista and the Peace Corps as alternatives to military service, and generally set on course a tough pacifism in the country.

And, while the space program was inaugurated under Eisenhower and the first manned flight out of the Mercury program in May, 1961 the result of Eisenhower having sought to employ the space program for peaceful pursuits, Kennedy continued that effort in what otherwise might have subsequently become a soporific by the end of Mercury, by setting an entirely unrealistic goal in 1961 of putting an American on the moon before 1970, to compete peacefully with the Russians in the field of technology, again, a competition more or less set in motion under Eisenhower, but extended with new vision under Kennedy.

But, he did not do such wonderfully courageous things as insuring that anti-flag burning amendments would be put before Congress and the people. Nor did he champion the Second Amendment. Nor did he believe in dropping the bomb as a solution to all our ills with respect to the Communist world. He just gave speeches.

Yeah, probably on balance not so much. Just a little, a few haphazard things which would trouble any "Conservative" for their lack of hitting the right buttons which excite their little hearts.

But, who could blame them their opinion? For their working slate of premises contains such gems as this one, the entirety of the entry on the Cuban Missile Crisis, written, we assume, by a not very astute elementary school student--at least we hope:

"Khrushchev and Castro went too far in 1962, secretly setting up medium range missiles in Cuba equipped with nuclear warheads that threatened the southeast as far as Atlanta. In his greatest moment, Kennedy rejected invasion plans but imposed a blockade and demanded the missiles be removed immediately. Khrushchev publicly backed down, but privately got Kennedy to remove American missiles from Turkey, while Castro secured the promise that the United States would never invade his island. The Cuban missile crisis reversed JFK’s image of ineptness in foreign policy, but his quiet, continuous escalation of military involvement in Vietnam set the stage for the whirlwind reaped by his successor."

That is so pathetically stupid and facile and, insofar as the latter statement, devoid of any factual basis at all, that we shall not deign even to supply anew the actual facts. They are set forth in the notes accompanying the last half of October, 1937 herein, as well as at many other credible resources on the internet, such as the JFK Library, those which document their facts with primary resources and not secondary revisionist history written by idiots who masquerade as Conservative thinktank gurus or other such faux intellectuality masking political and polemical agendas and lack of letters. (And by "letters" we do not mean, necessarily, letters after one's name, but rather letters in the sense of having read and studied and thought beyond the end of one's big red nose.)

We are compelled to note, however, that John F. Kennedy did not escalate "military involvement" in Vietnam, a common misconception apparently these days among people of about 40 years of age or younger who get their news through the straw of tv and Conservative guru books written by the blonde moron bombshell of lies and other "thinkers" who would not know a serious thought if it bit them in their bombshells.

The first military advisors to Vietnam were sent by President Eisenhower in 1958. President Kennedy, while stepping up slightly that process initially, was planning by November, 1963 de-escalation of even that limited commitment, authorizing a slow transition to enable the South Vietnamese Army adequately to enforce the country's security against the Chinese and Russian equipped North and Vietcong. But he did not escalate military involvement. That came after the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in August, 1964, beginning in earnest in February, 1965.

And, possibly the epitome of stupidity in this entry was this incredible statement under the intriguing heading, often discussed on talk radio and talk tv, "Was Kennedy liberal or conservative?" (Oh, what deep, intellectual inquiry...):

"Kennedy was basically a conservative, but he had to appeal to a primarily liberal base, so he offered symbols for the liberals while following a conservative course in foreign and domestic policy. After his death Kennedy's legacy was picked up by liberals, and there is a vague notion to the effect that Kennedy was a liberal. He was actually more of a conservative."

Ronald Reagan?

"He has been hailed by conservatives as one of the greatest American Presidents and the main inspiration for the conservative movement from the 1970s to the present.

"Reagan was an intellectual leader of American conservatism, and succeeded in moving the nation to the right in terms of reducing federal regulation and lowering taxes--and indeed in promoting the conviction that government was the problem and private enterprise the solution. He cut taxes but despite his proposals, spending and the federal deficit went up. After a short sharp recession early in his first term, the economy was strong by 1984. Proclaiming 'It's Morning Again in America', Reagan carried 49 of 50 states to win reelection. He moved the Supreme Court and the federal courts to the right with his appointments."

Besides the "morning in America" bit being in the first inauguration speech of 1981, not in 1984, the rest is self-explanatory as being the product of a vacuous mind incapable of thought. Even most serious Reaganites do not consider Ronald Reagan an "intellectual" force. And that supply-side economics and de-regulation they champion is precisely what has driven the country into the utter mess it is now in, having gotten a responsible respite from it during the Clinton years, but picked up with a vengeance again between 2001 and 2009.

But if you are "conservative", you do not think about it; you accept, chewing your jellybeans in the process with Phyllis Gadfly and her son, the editor of this glorious new publication. You go to rallies and blame the new President for all that he inherited from the last one and carp after his eight or nine months in office because he has not changed the world, or even had a terrorist attack to push his poll numbers temporarily through the roof. But, you do not remember anything. You do not study anything. You accept. Accepting orders is good; thinking, bad. Remember the last time you thought, Conservative? Remember? You had the irresistible impulse to steal that car as a teenager and went joy riding; and daddy got very mad and took away your liquor privileges for a whole month. Yeah, that’s right, Conservative, you remember, now.

But, if you are liberal, you have the authority to think, and thinking, as we know, is dangerously radical and must be abolished with non-thinking good Conservative-speak. Why, you might do something rational, which is against the “heart” and thus Christ and thus all religious upbringing. Heard in church: Rationalism, bad. Wouldn’t want to lose those liquor privileges, again.

So, we conclude from this quick read of two entries in Canswervapedia that JFK was essentially a do-nothing fake, a conservative masquerading as a liberal to little avail, whose image was built solely on the basis of his untimely and tragic death; Ronald Reagan, by contrast, was a true conservative, an intellectual force who transcended existence itself and was, more or less, a god incarnate, all purity, intellect, substance--any lack of performance being due solely to the mystical forces of economy far beyond his or any god’s control, however wise among the wise he was.

Why, of course, we knew that already. We read it at the Wicked-pedia. Why do we need this online duplicate of obscurantism and revisionism to supplement that agenda?

Well, you puts down your money, you gets what you pay for. Nothing for nothing. You can't argue with the salesman, we suppose.

But, we would like to know where we may obtain a version specially bound in rich, Corinthian leather, the new Bible, that is, which they are also busy writing online.

Let's see: "First, there was Ron, and Ron was Good, and Ron came after the false god Kennedy had gone and Johnson, even more false; second, there was Nostradamus, who saw all..."

Oh, but of course, we forgot: We are wrong.

The front page tells of the President ordering WPA scrapped for want of further need to relieve unemployment, its original purpose. The private war industries had taken up the slack sufficiently by this point to render relief rolls something of the past. Starting out its life in 1936 under the direction of Harry Hopkins and originally named the Works Progress Administration, it provided over eight million jobs during its seven years of existence. Its works included post office buildings, public swimming pools, public golf courses, small stadiums, roads, including some of the roads comprising the Blue Ridge Parkway, various public works projects, La Guardia Airport, Camp David, Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Coit Tower in San Francisco, (the latter actually under a predecessor program, the Public Works of Art program, part of PWA, begun in 1933 under the direction of Secretary of Interior Harold Ickes, becoming the Federal Arts Project under WPA), and a host of other government and public buildings, structures, and arts projects throughout the country.

Under its aegis also were born the Federal Writers’ Project and the Federal Theater, programs for which W. J. Cash had less than enthusiastic remarks in 1938, finding them often wasteful of funding on mediocrity, and even propaganda, rather than bestowing on starving artists their initial patronage. Yet, W. J. Cash’s eventual wife, Mary, had worked with the Federal Writers’ Project in summer 1938 while the two were courting, for her work in which he had nothing but kind words. Moreover, he had been turned down in 1936 for a position as an editor for the Federal Writers’ Project, a fortuitous rejection which cleared the way for his regular employment with The News in fall, 1937. So, perhaps the view one had at the time of at least the artistic wing of WPA, as with anything having to do with the arts, was based largely on subjectivism. Cash, however, also recognized the merit of the projects and did not make them the object of more than passing negative comment, seeking thereby to improve them, not knock them out of existence.

Whatever their merit and demerit, however, their purposes had now been served and the public coffers could ill afford any longer unnecessary luxuries. All attention was now dedicated to the war effort and all of the employment once needed to be absorbed by WPA was now either taken by the armed services directly or by war industries.

Also on the front page is mentioned the record-setting flights of Lieutenants Harold Comstock and Roger Dyar, each of whom flew a P-47 Thunderbolt in an extended dive at an estimated speed of 725 miles per hour, just 36 mph shy of Mach 1. The speeds were achieved accidentally as the pilots tried to recover from an extended high altitude dive with their controls frozen. If accurate, the speed would eclipse by at least 100 mph the speed of any airplane ever officially recorded at the time and any propeller-driven aircraft since. Mr. Comstock, incidentally, just passed away in April, 2009.

The "Jug", as the P-47 was affectionately dubbed by pilots for the resemblance of its fuselage to a moonshiner's jug, was designed by Alexander de Seversky and another Russian immigrant, Alexander Kartveli, of Republic Aviation; the fast, agile aircraft, which could fly quickly to high altitudes to avoid anti-aircraft fire, became a mainstay of Allied fighter squadrons during the remainder of the war.

On the editorial page, “Attrition” summarizes the increasing weakness of the Japanese Fleet. While of necessity based on incomplete figures at the time, the piece nevertheless paints an overall accurate picture of the woeful state of the Japanese Navy by the end of 1942 after its dauntingly auspicious debut before the world a year earlier. The Nazis and Japanese had conquered by piecemeal; but now their military machines, by which they had accomplished those remarkable feats of daring against outmanned and outgunned populations in Czechoslovakia, in Poland, in France, in China, in Southeast Asia, in the Southwest Pacific, were, in accordance with Newton’s Third Law of Motion, slowly being corroded by piecemeal.

“A New Low” reprises the topic of voter fraud and those 312 rejected ballots, among other reported irregularities, in Watauga County, N.C., location of its county seat, Boone, as first discussed in “Poll Cats” on November 11. It was, said the piece, a “veritable rat’s nest of election fraud”.

So, Richard Nixon and his coterie of Southern California operatives were not the first to invent this friendly pastime.

By the way, for your further edification, below are the first three paragraphs of the Canswervapedia entry for Franklin Roosevelt, the Socialist RadicaLiberal who had the first Political Action Committee with that "New Deal Coalition", (whatever the "Fifth party system" was being beyond our meager conception, probably something to do with his having ended Prohibition), but who was, by a Canswervative Congress finally brought to heel by their having ended his socialistic relief programs somewhere during the world war, the Depression having finally ended on December 7, 1941, coincidental with the Japanese attack (which, of course, therefore means that FDR planned the whole thing himself with, a, you know, Toho, or whatever--as all foreseen, of course, by Nostra D., who in the 531st quatrain said: "He who come on white Horse, he who is blessed, he who is named 'Concerning Once More', in mystic Coptic, spelt 'Gearna', saying, Morning, Morning, Morning, in Shining City on Hill, which in front of Big Cow turned reverse, nearly half hundred minus two after he, named 'Red's Leek', Dutchman, says Fear no fear but fear, in year of Hister, hear ye, all will end soon in 2012--give up, why you keep working, soldier boy?"):

"Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the 32nd President of the United States of America from 1933-45. He presided over the majority of the Great Depression, which did not end until the attack on Pearl Harbor and led the United States in World War II against the Axis Powers; he built the New Deal Coalition of voters and interest groups which dominated American politics into the 1960s.

"He is still the great hero to liberals but castigated by conservatives for shifting the nation to the left, growing the federal government, imposing regulations on business, following a no-growth economic policy, catering to labor unions, and building a permanent New Deal Coalition. On the other hand, conservatives admire his string [sic] military leadership that led the Allies to victory in record time in World War II.

"His New Deal was a very large, complex interlocking set of programs designed to produce relief (especially government jobs for the unemployed), recovery (of the economy), and reform (by which he meant regulation of Wall Street, banks and transportation), as well as Reelection (in 1936, 1940 and 1944) and Realignment of the Fifth party system. Conservatives strongly opposed many, but not all, of the New Deal programs. Conservatives abolished most of the relief programs when unemployment practically ended during World War II. Most of the regulations on business were ended about 1975-85, except for the regulation of Wall Street by the Securities Exchange Commission, which still exists. The major surviving program is Social Security, which Congress passed in 1935."

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