Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 1, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

RE: Errata et addendum

Ms. O’Hara,

It being Holy Week, it is indeed fitting and proper that the photo on the editorial page is proof positive that Paul, my favorite rabbi, lives. You husband is proudly proclaiming one of the rabbi’s great truisms; viz, “Take a little wine for thy stomach’s sake…and other ailments”. By the by, would it be deplorably homophobic of me to inquire why there was never a picture of any of Professor Stevie Goldstein’s various spouses?

But that’s not why I write.

I am here, like Henry the Second, prostrate on the steps of the world HQ of the Sentinel to accept whatever punishment is deemed fit. Let me first extend a modern American Liberal apology – that’s the kind where you begin by saying I don’t think I said or did anything wrong but if I did and if I offended anyone anywhere in the non-Ptolemeian universe and don’t you love living in the nether world of the subjunctive, I am sorry – to Little Boss Hogg of the Parkland Hoggs. I meant to call him a “smarmy, chinless, little shit”, not just a “little shit”.

I correct the record for 3 reasons:

#1 – He is. And truth is an absolute defense against libel.

#2 - “Free men speak with free tongues.” Thank God for DWEMs!

#3 – “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

#3A – Is it too late to include “meaner than cat shit” in my description of him?

But on to today’s editorial, and how Christian of you on Easter Sunday to canonize NYT columnist Tom Friedman who, by the way, is a Jew. It creates a target-rich environment, AKA the New York Times. It’s a shame we outlawed both strapado and bastinado.

Is this the same New York Times that called Abraham Lincoln a “baboon” in 1864? Is this the same New York Times that pushed for a cease fire in 1864 that would have allowed slavery to continue? Is this the same New York Times that refused to accept the evidence of its own eyes that Walter Duranty, its foreign correspondent stationed in Moscow, and another Pulitzer Prize winner, was bought and paid for agent of the KGB?

Its perfidy in ignoring the 20^th century’s first European holocaust, one that resulted in some 8,000,000 deaths [Kulaks? Jews? Ukraine? Thank God for GOOGLE] and encouraged Hitler, another mass slaughterer, yet still a distant second to Stalin, to plan his own holocaust. That New York Times?

Had their employee, the bureau chief with the bureau being Berlin, another Pulitzer Prize winner in 1934, been found to be in thralldom to the Gestapo rather than the KGB, they would still be apologizing. And apologizing. And apologizing. And apologizing.

How about Herbert L. Matthews, the columnist who helped Castro take over and after 60 years of scientific socialism the only problem that has been solved is teen-age obesity? Do you remember the ad announcing, under a picture of a smiling Castro, with the unspoken caption “I got my job through the New York Times”? I do. 

Is it the same New York Times that employed Anthony Lewis, another Pulitzer Prize winner, who wrote that anyone who tsked-tsked Pol Pot, noted Cambodian agrarian reformer and wanabee community activist, who killed 1/3^rd – repeat – 1/3^rd of his countrymen to get the survivors to think straight, of “cultural arrogance”?

Before I get to the target-rich environment that Tom Friedman, still another NYT Pulitzer Prize winner, a brief History of me and the Times is in order.

My father, the legendary Judge Smith, used to read the two Arthurs – Krock and Daley – to me on Sundays.

 I did my last puzzle, in ink, of course in ink, on October 3, 1999 on an American Airlines flight from Dallas to Fort Lauderdale. I am precise as to the date because it was witnessed by Boss Fiedler, then the head of the Miami Herald. I summarily stopped reading the Times just before the United States went to war in March, 2003. [Let the record show that the war, however it will turn out, had overwhelming Congressional support. 3/4ths of the members voting aye still counts as “overwhelming”, doesn’t it?] The reason was simple: The Times had more Page 1 coverage on the lack of bidets and lady’s tees at Augusta National, the home of The Masters, than it had of this country going to war. “Iron my shirts” was the best protest sign there.

There are several tell-tale signs of modern American Liberalism. Among them is constructing universals from particulars. Couple that with the continuously constantly confusing conflation of correlation and causation and chaos, intellectual, political, and moral, abounds. It leads to “eclectic indignation”, a malady without which hard core, card carrying mALs would surely go mad. A current example of this is Jimmy Carter, surely the worst President of the 20^th century, telling us that Americans demand Presidential spousal fidelity. It is, of course, a rule that did not apply to FDR, JFK, LBJ, and the poster boy of “That’s my story and I’m sticking to it”, subtitled “You better put some ice on that lip”, President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs, the King of the Oval Office One-Eyed Trouser Snakes, WJC. 

When the tank containing “eclectic indignation” runs low, IV top-offs are available. In rare instances; e.g., sensible gun control laws like outlawing bazookas and sensible restrictions on abortion like if the emerging baby gives you the finger so you won’t put the vacuum cleaner into the top of his head must never be discussed together in the same area code, “eclectic indignation” enemas are available. Don’t ask. Obamacare covers it.

Artistic ennui and the task of making the lamb ready for the oven saps and sates my noblesse oblige need to instruct the ”lesser breeds” in the ways of real politick. My devotion to “climate change” is heightened every March 21^st by the sonorous lectures of noted Eye-Tie climatologist, Tony “Red” Vivaldi. Let it be noted that since Harrison Salisbury and Anthony Lewis have gone to a better place, a place where women and minorities don’t suffer disproportionately because of their genetic and racial makeup, a condition that the hive is still working to blame Trump for, Thomas Friedman has assumed the mantle of moral superiority and the cloak of invisibility to the laws governing gravity. He is now the keeper of the seals of the most sacred order of “Non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”. “Non-malodorous fecal matter syndrome”? Send a SASE.

Suffice to say by paraphrasing Lincoln Steffens, “I have been over to Russia to see the future and it works”, Friedman’s paradigmatic template for perfect governance, akin to Gibbon’s 5 Emperors as the acme of good rulers and advancing civilization, is China. He wants us to be more like China. Thanks, but no thanks.

My father told me that when the Chines/Japanese war broke out he would ask his shirt man spoke about it dispassionately. Weeks of headlines screaming that 500 Chinese were killed while Japanese casualties were less than 30 did not phase him. His reasoning was simple and based on actuarial principles. “Pretty soon no more Japanese.”

I’ll not take lessons from them or from their shill.

Kevin Smith

CC – Michael Putney

PS – On to a somewhat more delicate subject. The picture of you with a calorically challenged Tom Friedman and your husband, a beefed-up evil twin [perhaps] of Michael Caine with you in the middle with a somewhat tumescent glow on your face – a non-starter for fire breathing, card carrying modern American Liberals, people like you, people who believe that Midnight Basketball never got a fair shot, so to speak, suggests that he is grabbing your non-steatyagonous arse with his one free hand. Please tell me I’m right.

How do you get a B.S. in journalism? Were ABs not offered? Ever heard of the Trivium?