What’s that, once proud Grand Old Party?
In early February of 1941, following the fall of France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Belgium to Hitler’s marauding armies, as young (average age 20) British spitfire and hurricane fighter pilots continued to drive Luftwaffe bombers from the skies over London and other U.K. cities, and as Hitler’s armies ravished what remained of free Europe, U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent British Prime Minister Winston Churchill a poem by Longfellow which Roosevelt said: “applies to you people as it does to us.” The verse: “…Sail on, O Ship of State! Sail on, O Union, strong and great! Humanity with all its fears, with all the hopes of future years, is hanging breathless on thy fate.”
And the Prime Minister replied — for history, as things turned out, “We shall not fail or falter; we shall not weaken or tire. Neither the sudden shock of battle nor the long-drawn trials of vigilance and exertion will wear us down. Give us the tools and we will finish the job.” And we did. Good job, FDR!
Elected members of the currently treasonous but former Grand Old (Republican) Party want to cut or end U.S. help to the Ukraine as it fights for its life, and ours, against Russia’s brutal butchers. Really, seriously, Grand Old Party? You’re kidding, right, nutcase Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, New York Representative Matt Gaetz? You’d swap democracy for dictatorship and communism? You’d trade life in the United States for that in Russia, where if you criticize the government or the military or the state-controlled media, you vanish? Know anything about history, Marjorie? (One suspects you and your fellow anti-America saboteurs are, like Trump, absolutely ignorant of U.S. history – including the fact that at least 42 documented attempts to assassinate Adolph Hitler were made from 1932 through 1944 — and ten or more were led by German generals and other senior officers! Yet Trump asked General Mark. A. Milley, U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, why his, Trump’s, generals were not more like Hitler’s). Well, who doesn’t?
As Mark Antony might say today in Shakespeare’s play, Julius Caesar, “come hither, 2023 anti-America Grand Old Party whackos, and lend me your ears!”
Stop watching 1930’s Nazi propaganda-inspired Fox News. Elevate and educate yourselves by tuning in, instead, to authentic evening news reports over CNN (channel 5) or Public Broadcasting (channels 7 or 12 in our area); take out a digital subscription to the New York Times or Washington Post; read respected conservative columnist George Will in the Spokane Review; and Boise’s syndicated former Republican Idaho attorney general and supreme court justice Jim Jones in the Bonner Daily Bee. And read responsible, rational, literate letters to the editor of the Reader from Sandpoint citizen activists who think democracy is a pretty great thing and worth keeping. (Some such locals were once members of the original Grand Old Party). But not your Republican party Marjorie, Matt, Steve Bannon, John Eastman, The Pillow Guy, Koch Brothers, Jim Jordan, Roger Stone, Jared Kushner, Rudy Giuliana, Governor DeSantis, Mark Meadows, George Santos, Trump Junior – and faux wizard behind social media’s curtain of lies, deranged predator Donald J. Trump.
Early in World War II, with the fall of France to Germany and Hitler threatening England and the rest of Europe (and eventually, the U.S.) President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill signed the Lend-Lease Act in which America, still officially neutral, would send money, food, oil, 50 aged naval destroyers and other military gear to England, followed by aid to China, France, Russia, Greece, Australia, India, New Zealand — to some 40 nations allied against the German-Japanese-Italy Axis.
We gave Prime Minister Churchill the tools, as requested (equivalent to an estimated $725 billion or more today) — and England and its allies (that’s us, GOP!) finished the job. Had we not, as in naïve and needy Germany in the early 1930s, we might be goose-stepping down Sandpoint’s First Street today with the Gestapo at our backs, watching for dissidents to torture. Correspondingly, if the free world loses in Ukraine today — that is to say, if Ukraine loses to Russia — our grandkids and their kids could conceivably be genuflecting to every KGB agent roaming around Farmin Park on Saturday mornings, where citizens would be slave laborers, not happy-go-lucky shoppers and friends.
But then, look at the bright side! What if we won the worldwide nuclear war spawned by Ukraine’s defeat? Yippee! Life, if any, on a vaporized planet!
Come on, once Grand Old Party. Choose freedom. Give Ukraine what she needs!
TIM H. HENNEY
Sandpoint