The Nation: Cheap Shot

Someone two weeks ago mailed all 100 U.S. Senators a four-page pamphlet that was written by the ultra-right-wing John Birch Society and demanded President Nixon’s impeachment. The grounds for this action were unblinkingly harsh: Nixon’s “deliberate treason” in the conduct of both foreign and domestic policy. Almost as bad, the diatribe went on, “Mr. Nixon has spent more money—and has spent it more wastefully—than any other President, monarch, dictator or ruler of any kind in all human history.”

Whoever wanted to send the Senators that message certainly could not be characterized as a spendthrift. The envelopes carrying the blast were franked with a privately printed stamp picturing a pair of hands held in prayer, the American flag and the inscriptions

FOR GOD AND COUNTRY and FIGHT COMMUNISM. Though the bogus stamps carried no rate and no official imprimatur declaring them to be U.S. postage, the postal service canceled them and sent the letters on their way, pre-sumably unable to recognize free enterprise when it saw it.