Whew, I got my column accepted last week at the Washington Times with no intrusion from the censors. In fact, with no censors! At the Good Times, there are no censors at work. I used to write this column on a weekly basis for The Washington Post, and it could be a harrowing experience. Every week, I had to be certain that I had crossed no barriers with the potentates that be. Certain things could not be said. One editor told me that readers around the world thought that The Washington Post was the official voice of our government and that the Post had to be careful. "Careful of what?" I asked. Could my occasional intemperance lead to war? I doubt it, but these were the kinds of fears that the potentates at the Post lived with. Possibly they still live with them.
Most of the time, I wrote without mishap, but suddenly, out of the blue, the Post's censor would strike. I remember one summer, years ago, when the Olympics were underway. The Russians and the East Germans were accused of drugging their athletes so that the women were Amazons and the men were almost supernatural. I was writing my column with, as luck would have it, a former Olympian at my side. We both were indignant about the communists' thwarting the Olympic protocols against performance-enhancing drugs. I referred in my column to the drugged-up athletes as the "Soviets' stallions and geldings." A day or two later, the column appeared, and the "Soviets' stallions and geldings" had been changed to the "Soviets' athletes." Well, at least the censor did not cut the column completely.
So, why was I apprehensive last week? Well, I wrote about the Democratic presidential candidates' sudden seizure of halitosis or of garbage spiel. Suddenly, it was the rare Democratic candidate who did not use the "f---" word in every other sentence, or so it seemed. It was, for them, a kind of punctuation mark or perhaps a gesture of sincerity. They used not only the "f---" word but practically every other foul word in the book. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand was the most flagrant, using almost a dozen such words in one presentation. Yet there were other foul-mouthed would-be presidents. The women were especially egregious. The wife of former Vice President Joe Biden told candidate Kamala Harris to "Go f--- yourself," and another woman, a congresswoman, was the most extreme. She used a word that she shared with her son. It was mother-something or other.
When I reviewed the several paragraphs in which I employed the offending words, I became concerned. Was it possible that the Good Times kept a censor down in the basement for just such an exigency as last week's column? But how could I talk about the Democrats' offensive language without bringing their foul vocabulary forward? So, I went ahead and replicated the Democrats' language. I hope my sick aunt was not reading this newspaper on Wednesday. Yet, I have not heard even from her. Obviously, a lot of people are aware of the Democrats' excesses, and I think that we shall be hearing from them in 2022. There is more than one reason that 2022 will be a wave year. "Defund the police" is one reason. Crime in the streets is another, and there are more.
I think that the Good Times performed a public service in presenting the Democrats' garbage spiel for all to see. I know this is indeed a family newspaper, but families need to know how extreme the Democratic Party has become. Never before has either party descended so low, and by the way, they did it all at once. There were no dissenters. Some abstained from using foul language, but no Democrat made bold to denounce the garbage spiel. In years gone by, there was brave talk about "leadership," particularly from Democrats. Someone should have stood up to do the right thing. I never heard from them. And I am left with another question. Why, in the Democratic primaries, did so many Democrats choose, all of a sudden, garbage spiel to show that they were sincere or whatever they were trying to prove?
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