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Show y.y IFegleu' Ug West brook Pegler Released by WNU Features. THE vigor of the department of justice in prosecuting Congressman Congress-man Parnell Thomas, the chairman of the committee on un-American activities, is a dramatic reproach to the same bureau when we consider the attorney general's iron apathy toward the traitorous conspirators exposed by the Thomas committee. At worst, if he be guilty, Thomas filched a few thousand dollars and P-.-f did that under a i logical, if rather daring, extension of ' 1 the common prac-'tfl-S tice of . nepotism m- li on Capitol Hill. On ?r- the other hand, doz-;$M doz-;$M ens ' individuals. '''S' planted in secret re-, re-, -, (S cesses of the gov- .' ... .. N V i ernment, werestout-, werestout-, N..aui ly accused by stand-up stand-up witnesses of be-PEGLER be-PEGLER traying the United States to the Russian enemy. The department of justice has ignored these cases. Even Russian aliens implicated in the same band of conspirators have not been molested. And a few days ago Tom Clark, the attorney at-torney general, and Mrs. Clark, were photographed in happy social doings at the Soviet embassy. Thomas is charged with defrauding defraud-ing the government by kick-backs from real persons who were fictitious ficti-tious employees. He is a rotund hick of a vanishing American type whose social errors in the examination examina-tion of witnesses were the honest patriotic blurts of the typical main street insurance man, druggist or service stationist. IT WAS NOT BY HIS DOING THAT CONGRESSIONAL PROCEDURE PRO-CEDURE WAIVED THE TRICKY LEGALISTIC TANGLES OF THE COURTS. Method method of get ting information was Was there when- Thomas p . became chairman of Present cornmjlteet established, estab-lished, tested, and vindicated long ago. He just made use of it and the gruesome fact is that for all his prejudice against traitors and spies, he is no less judicial and fair than many of the fully articled Judges of the federal courts now sitting. The kick-back of pay has been common practice in congress for decades. I dare say Mr. Clark himself him-self has paid his tithe to his party for years, failing which he would be a miracle man deserving the dribbling adulation of Henry Wallace. Wal-lace. All politicians pay it to their parties and President Truman sat on a county board in Kansas City which collected for the Pendergast machine a bounty called lug on every dollar spent for public Improvements. His personal abstention from lag is interesting but doesn't amount to formal condemnation of lug as lug. The late Ray Clapper once defeated de-feated many members of congress tip for re-election by exposing in print the fraud or, in a sweeter word, white graft, which had become be-come a firm auxiliary to the family fam-ily income of statesmen on the hill. The racket is still standard practice, prac-tice, no more discountenanced by public opinion than looting by major-generals. 'Pastel As say ClaPPer'a expose drove out a Of passel of rumpled Vulgarians gaTians ot lower house, many of vhom are only transients, anyway. But it did no good and the sense of congress was indignation at Clapper and mourning for the miscreant brothers. Actually, the institution of nepotism is rock-ribbed in government gov-ernment and in the big unions almost al-most all of which now support dynastic dy-nastic families of parasites. It has never been more ' flagrantly fla-grantly practiced than by the late Roosevelt. He loaded the government rolls with his son, Jimmy, at $10,000 to fetch him ont of mischief in Boston with an Impecunious 6he-cousin at 0,000 whose duty . ostensibly was to choose pretty chintzes for our far-flung embassies and old Uncle Fred Delano. Uncle Fred was barnacled onto the national resources planning board, with a room in the state department de-partment From this office he used to write evasive letters to naive investors in-vestors in the bonds of a scab coal mine in the Pennsylvania fields which the family owned and operated. operat-ed. The bondholders took a neat hellacking. At the approach of election day, there was more alarm among Dem-ocratic Dem-ocratic congressmen than Republicans Republi-cans over the captious attitude of Mr. Clark toward Congressman Thomas. W Dewey were then elected and ound it in his soul to prosecute Im-Partially, Im-Partially, more Democrats than Re-Publicans Re-Publicans would go to quod. The Ganger passed, of course, with the posting of belated returns but there itill a feeling among Mr. Clark's Partisans that far more harm than Kood must come of the Thomas Prosecution. |