Gunning for Sleepy Frank

Colonel McCormick vs the media elite

Here at the Chicago Tribune we have for years labored to break the spell that Franklin Roosevelt and his communist media enablers have held over the American voter.

We have told you repeatedly about Mr. Roosevelt’s hostility to freedom of speech and how his prosecution of this paper in particular keeps Americans from learning the truth about this costly and ill-advised war against Herr Hitler, who until Mr. Roosevelt’s war-mongering succeeded in bamboozling Congress was our strongest bulwark against the communists in Moscow. We have likewise told you the honest truth about his communist program of taxing the rich and lavishing the proceeds on bums, wasters, and artists, and the ruin to which it will lead us all.

Yet largely because of his propaganda “fireside chats” on the radio, and their appeal to Negroes and unmarried women “emancipated” by war work, Mr. Roosevelt has mesmerized enough voters to win three presidential elections and support for even his most communist plots.

But we have reason to believe that the American voter is at last getting wise, as they say, to the plain fact that Mr. Roosevelt is too old and frail to fulfill the duties of the office he holds.

It is well known that since his affliction with polio Mr. Roosevelt has been unable to walk without assistance, much like a baby or an imbecile. There was a time, in the early stages of his disease, when the more sentimental among us applauded his triumph over adversity — under the sway of what we like to call the Campobello Myth.

But even in the ‘30s Mr. Roosevelt was deceiving the public by presenting himself as a capable of completing the arduous tasks required of a Chief Executive. The Tribune has learned from scientists and medical authorities that polio not only affects the central nervous system, but also the reasoning part of the brain, in much the same way as do the spirochetes of syphilis. In retrospect it is clear that Mr. Roosevelt’s cockamamie New Deal schemes are attributable to this mental infirmity — either that, or his communist aides like Harold Ickes have taken advantage of it to implement these programs without his knowledge.

As the years have passed, Mr. Roosevelt’s condition has only grown more dire — and the effects of his extreme age, which our intelligence informs us may be as many as twenty years greater than the sixty to which he admits, are also in evidence. Reports reach us of the President’s conniption fits and even a loss of bowel and bladder control. This is all shielded from the public by government censors and a complaisant Democrat press that, our sources tell us, secretly assist Mr. Roosevelt in his fireside chats through German “tape-recording” technology, using only rehearsed bits of his speech carefully strung together to make him sound coherent.

The Tribune has published experts’ reconstructions of what these broadcasts would sound like without such intervention, and a gruesome and sobering spectacle they make. Far from acknowledging our public service, however, the Democrat press accuses us of misrepresentation, a serious charge to which our lawyers are preparing a response.

Nonetheless we make every possible effort to alert the nation to its rule by a babbling incompetent — for example, postering walls on city streets with photographs of Mr. Roosevelt being lifted in his wheelchair like a baby in a bassinet. Our polls indicate that we are having some success. When we ask voters, “Do you wish to be ruled by an incontinent communist?” a large majority rejects the proposition.

We will not relent. The 1944 election will be the most consequential in our nation’s history. We have just one more chance to avoid the disaster toward which the communist Democrats have aimed us for years. Therefore, since our discussions of policy have made but little impact, the Tribune will henceforth devote itself to publishing evidence of FDR’s mental and physical deterioration — in our editorials, our reporting, our photographs, our cartooning, and even in promotions like the “Draw FDR’s Dirty Diaper and Win a Philco” competition on today’s front page — as quickly as we can get our hands on it.

Some say the American people will never accept such disturbing news about their Commander-in-Chief — but we are determined to keep it coming until they learn to do so.