The Charlotte News

Tuesday, September 3, 1940

FIVE EDITORIALS

Site Ed. Note: We gave our loves some cherries that had no stones. The stones were not singing to old men's bones. The Louis kisses made them all fret alone with cones which were not worthy of old corn pone, pining for the phasing of dispicient aphasia, once controlled, now evident in plenty in a strange day's clones. And thus feeling exposed, come out taunting as pit-bulls.

Well, that out of the way, here appears once again, in light of the silliness we saw, ever so briefly, exhibited yesterday by a team of at least one of the well-known daily tv commentariatissimos, surrounding the comment of Senator Obama suggesting you can't put lipstick on a pig, by the forces inimical to freedom, an attempt plainly to squelch the free expression of ideas, even if stated in playful and offhand fashion, in rhetoric characteristic of political campaigns going back to the founding of the country.

This time, it appears promulgated, as we would have predicted after that performance of last week and after reading as much as is available about her vague past, by the campaign for the presidency, that is, we mean, for the vice-presidency, of Sarah Palin--who quickly has become in spite of herself, and because of her trying to be taken oh so very seriously, a national joke; and, we posit, for good reason: Her candidacy is one which becomes increasingly a cruel joke on the country.

She is unfit for any position of national leadership.

She is a petty hypocrite who brags about herself in a fashion reminiscent of the worst populists ever to hit the landscape.

We won't name too many names because we don't want to do a terrible injustice to the worst such petty hypocrites before her.

But Joe McCarthy comes first to mind.

If she ever became President or, for that matter, even Vice-President, God help us. She is a person who does not understand the concept of democracy and freedom. Her idea of it is that as long as someone agrees with her, that person is fine. But otherwise, no one has the right to think and say anything. It is characteristic of her entire past which we can find. There is a report that when she first became mayor of Wasilla, she ordered certain books banned from the local library and then fired the librarian, backing off the position under protest.

That anyone would do such a thing in the first instance underscores a definite problem--one which connotes an inability or unwillingness to think through issues before acting, but rather acts either out of pure emotion or, more probably in her case, calculated Machiavellian motives to win votes of people who do act purely out of emotion. Perhaps, in her little town there in Alaska, she wore the cap and bells proudly to diffuse untoward emotions which might be vented otherwise. But whether we need that in the country, especially with her apparently oh so very serious side enunciating policy behind this bafflingly buffoonish posterior, is highly dubious.

In any event, we don't wish to dwell on it too much, but if you know anyone who really, really finds Ms. Palin just wonderful, perhaps you might try this simple exercise with them: ask them to read, without reading this note, so as not to prejudice them at the start, the little piece on today's page, entitled "Over-Sized". It is a very short piece of two paragraphs, one which was more or less probably thrown together at the end of the day to fill space than being of any real substance, but sometimes such things can be fun and elucidatory at the same time, even now 67 years later.

This one has to do with government waste and so it is quite apropos to the subject on which we begin our note.

"Over-Sized", we opine, has a mistake in the basic semantic structure of one of its sentences, at least within the context presented of the piece and paragraph in which it rests. Undoubtedly, as we say, it was a deadliner, its approximately 200 words having probably been composed in less than five minutes to keep from having undue filler material comprising the bottom half of the second column. Maybe someone had a long lunch or spilled coffee on their print or had a typewriter run out of ribbon , had to go out and buy some around the corner, the shop being out, the Office of Production Management perhaps having curtailed orders piggishly, and all excess available having been hoarded by Hugh Johnson, causing the editorialist to have to go home and cull a half-used ribbon off his L.C. Corona.

Anyway, having had such days in strict compliance with Murphy's Law ourselves, we can only imagine some of the various competing vicissitudes of daily life which might have deluded themselves into achieving a manifested reality to block otherwise brilliantly productive print, causing the column to ring less than completely engrossing today, as it strikes us. Others will beg to differ, no doubt. But that is why we live in a democracy.

So, have your subject, the Palin fan, or one you suspect of same, male or female, find the simple logical-semantic error in the two paragraphs. Have them rearrange it to convey, by the exchange of a mere three words, the same, or at least apparently intended, meaning, but without the error. They might profit by the simple exercise of the mind.

It might lend credence actually to the first example of one of the tall tales the author most liked among those told by Baron von Munchausen, as set forth in the piece from the Baltimore Evening Sun. If not necessary for your subject to be quite so completely reflected to opposing eyes, then at least it might result in the first tall tale exampled being made manifest, belying the ostensibly dissembling pastiche of apparently dissociated constituent parts of the metaphor thus conveyed--that is the togate-stringed stairway wall-banger which sometimes causes tickle to the mind, overheated from the day's too phrased calm and quietude of the mild-mannered Muscovy's mustachioed missed key.

For example, "u" for "e", "r", "h", and "it", as we quite inadvertently accomplished recently because of what we have come to call "fast-writing", wisely applicable in certain structured and disciplined forms of thought only where one has had copious training and has a fair grasp therefore of the subject matter, a sort of semi-sleeping state, but accomplished with wide-awake adrenals, learned slowly but then conditioned to quick execution in modes of stress, such as time-limited examinations; then, over time, capable of being set forth with the ease of effortless streams--much as music becomes composed and then played by the accomplished musician.

Inevitably, however, this mode leads to occasional errors in composition, letters or words transposed and the like--that to which we typically refer as "typos" or misfingered squigglies, which may be subconscious, guided, or simply spritely serendipitous "bulls", as you wish to interpret it from within, such as relatitionship or Cruiksank or Lindburgh or Caroll, as we caught recently in our text thusly produced in torrential reigns.

If that isn't enough to convince the subject of the occasional error of their ways, then try this: A hockey mom is to a pit-bull as a lawn-jockey is to just what, therefore, in an illogical apples-to-oranges comparational transition to "lipstick", we don't know precisely, but it is likely only with any certainty fathomable within the dipstick eye of the beholder who composed the original stick dip, probably. This is what we conclude led the crowd at the Republican convention last week to roar and cheer so loudly at, when literally viewed, that which was no more discernible than dissociational nonsense. Ditto with "Drill Now!"

It's sort o' like Chevys 'n' Fords, Lincolns 'n' Caddies. 'Tis cars, me lads and lassies, only cars. But when the Mulligan's in the moonshine burns, sometimes the George Washington cable's in the churn.

"Smashed it in the classic form... Threw it in the fireplace, left it there awhile... God works in wondrous ways."

And, Troglodytic Troians may find release in Aintree.

A.Y.E.?

Incidentally, also, we find by reading The New York Times today that the Palin pipeline is "far from being a reality". That's not news, but rather a foregone conclusion.

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