The Charlotte News

Tuesday, February 17, 1942

FOUR EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: Raymond Clapper tells on today's page of the positive sign of a unified national foreign policy vaned by the fact that 1944 presidential hopeful (and eventual Republican nominee in both 1944 and 1948), Thomas E. Dewey, the District Attorney on the wedding cake running for governor of New York, declared that the Republican Party would not welcome appeasement, that only total victory in the war was an acceptable conclusion. Likewise, finds Mr. Clapper, says the director of the Republican National Committee, Clarence Kelland. Appeasement and isolationism are no longer tenets of a platform on which Republicans might depend to obtain them sufficient votes to win.

Amy Bassett meanwhile writes similarly of the resurgence of appeasers and America Firsters with the repeated reports of losses and setbacks in the Far East.

Paul Mallon reports of the country's gripe list: first, aimed at the President, Congress, and the Office of Civilian Defense, notably in the latter the former presence of Mayor La Guardia, now resigned, and Mrs. Roosevelt, having promised soon to resign, and the perceived reckless expenditure therein of money to seemingly frivolous ends--"fan dancers" and Donald Duck notes "Subversion" in the column, criticizing such descriptions as hyperbole. Next on the list of discontent was the sloth of the Navy in undertaking a Pacific offensive.

The evidence had heaped up consistently during the previous couple of weeks that the fragile façade of unity appeared rapidly to be crumbling as the public demonstrated restive impatience.

And, someone ought to have remarked to Senator Soaper that "over", in the sense he uses it, is not an adverb but a preposition. Over, under, sideways, down--the first two, as used, being prepositions, the third adjectival and thus potentially adverbial, the fourth being anything you want, including a noun, dependent on how the down is found.

In any event, as Churchill said, never end a sentence with a preposition, such as "over", or you start the whole damned thing over again. ("Mission Accomplished" is neither recommended, even if no preposition was used.) Instead, try it this way: War Is Over, for now.

There being not much else worthy of comment today on the page which we haven't before recently highlighted, we shall simply say don't tie no bows.