Personal Asides: The Big `50s Songfest Trivia Game…The Cloven-Footed, Fork-Tailed “New York Times”…Answers to Political Trivia.

`50s Songfest.

All right: no search engines. A big hit was Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” Without Internet help, complete these lines…

I was born one mornin’ when _____________
Picked up my shovel and _________________.
I hauled Sixteen Tons of __________________.
And the store boss said, “Well____________ !”

Chorus:

You haul Sixteen Tons and _______________?
Another day older and ___________________.
St. Peter don’t you call me cause___________
I owe my soul to _________________________.

New York Times.

It’s amazing…absolutely amazing…how “The New York Times” allows its liberal, secular-hedonist mind-set which we have come to accept as sophisticated, to dominate all its coverage: from obituaries to entertainment and features. The canonization once more of Betty Ford in its front page stories of Gerald Ford’s funeral is a case in point. The role of First Lady has always been that of a model for the nation’s standard morality (notwithstanding her own private attitudes or behavior) from Martha Washington to Laura Bush. I can’t tell you how comforting it was for Lillian and me as parents of teen-agers in the `70s to have Mrs. Ford shrug off the idea of pre-marital sex in her own daughter in an interview that so delighted Manhattan impiety. In one interview on “Sixty Minutes,” she endorsed “Roe v. Wade” and said she would “not be surprised” if her attractive eighteen year old daughter, Susan, had had an affair. And then, in the replay last week, have her remark that Susan had asked her, “what’s an affair?” which “The Times” swallowed delightedly. Give us all a break.

That shocking statement of the Fords’ acquiescence to pagan culture ricocheted around the conservative electorate to the extent that Ford himself estimated it cost him 60,000 votes and Rumsfeld said it was easily “double that.” It had no future effect on Jerry as after he served as president, he endorsed her view on abortion. By putting her instantly on its cover at the time, “Time” magazine’s slavish covetousness of unchristian pop culture may well have produced a fall-off of more. And even now as Ford lay in the coffin, the good, grey “Times” couldn’t help but gush its praise for a mod woman so insouciant that she would shrug off what has been the Judeo-Christian constant in child-raising and personal behavior for 2000 years.

Even now the vapid words of the woman who earned the title “Betty Boop” are regarded by secularists as courageous. Go figure. All the Carters, man and wife, had to do was to continue being mum to embody tradition: they did. The fall-off from the socially conservative base was stunning. You can recount all you want about Ford’s typifying decency but the veneer as applied to philosophy was only wafer-thin. It was “The Times’” pleasure to recount last week how close Ford was to Carter because of dislike of the conservative views of Ronald Reagan which had defeated both. Rather than grouse about the views, Ford could have ruminated about the anomaly of one regarded as so straight as to be boring losing the image-war to a divorced, remarried, abortion-bill-signing ex-Hollywood star. Betty was the reason.

One answer to how Betty Ford got that way came to me about the same time of that “Sixty Minutes” show from the wife of a contemporary House Republican leader who was also to be a presidential aspirant…one who herself was no conservative shrinking violet (although probably not dismissing as trivial her own daughter’s teen promiscuity). Keke Anderson, wife of John B., said that years and years of Minority Leader Ford being on the road, speaking at every town, village and hamlet in behalf of GOP congressmen…one year alone clocking 297 evenings away…and leaving his wife at home to nurture her grievances and take to the bottle, produced a resentment-filled wife—caused by Jerry’s selfishness and vaunted ambition at its worst.

To Keke who knew Betty well (Betty the wife of the minority leader, Keke the wife of the chair of the House Republican Conference) Betty’s embrace of secular values showed an inner resentment at her husband chase of political power which made her a stay-at-home widow. Now if we could only plumb the full texture of resentment which transported “The Times” from one-time nurturer of the American moral ethic to the scandalously nihilistic bible of irreligion…disparager of marriage to rooter for America’s defeat in its latest wars to prime supporter of try-it-you’ll-like-it varieties of sexual perversion…we’d be getting somewhere.

The second “Times” slur of the same day came with a feature profile of a beauteous actress I regard with admiration. She is Patricia Heaton, who played Raymond’s wife in “Everybody Loves Raymond”—a sitcom I didn’t particularly care for, but which lent her the recognition to speak-out beyond her stage-character…in far different terms than did Mrs. Ford. Patty Heaton, married and the mother of four teen boys, declined to appear on some stages where traditional values were being scourged by the oh-so-intelligent modern arts. A pro-lifer (also anti-death penalty advocate) she is Honorary Chair of “Feminists for Life.”

She committed the cardinal sin to the “Times” lifestyle by going public and opposing embryonic stem cell experimentation in the Missouri plebiscite. That, of course, casts her into the netherworld of hell in Manhattan-style uplifted eyebrow society of “The Times.” Heaton, by the way, is no blue-nose prude. She was born to a daily communicant Catholic family and, going to the stage, lost her way, had a failed marriage, went on binge drinking, searched through varied churches, remarried and fighting her way back has a solid marriage and motherhood, is an evangelical Protestant with a mature, let’s-not-be-polarizing-about-it demeanor but is her own very independent…and very beautiful, let it be stated…actress and mature individual.

Of course, the “Times” can’t handle that. I mean: can’t handle it! It had the unutterable nerve to reproduce a U-Tube-based lefty attack on Heaton for of all things having “cosmetic surgery”…having some twerp saying that if embryonic stem cells could improve cosmetic surgery, Heaton would be for it in a minute. The “cosmetic surgery” was to repair the muscular damage that came from four C-sections for this woman to continue to earn her living as an actress. I tell you, the “Times” is no longer just liberal but gushing with malevolent cloven-hoofed demonolatry against Judeo-Christianity.

Answers.

John Titus gets the George Wallace quotation right. What two words did Wallace utter on his inauguration as governor of Alabama as a hurled barb to the federal government? “Segregation forever!”…Terrell Bryant is on the right track but hasn’t gotten it right when he says “segregation now.” He also has the right president being sworn in on January 20 rather than March 4—Franklin Roosevelt—but the wrong year, 1941 instead of 1937. Other answers have been replayed here. Thanks one and all. And Happy New Year!