SUNDAY, APRIL 9, 2017
The busiest intersection in the Tri-State at Beechmont Avenue and Five Mile Road in Anderson Township is now “officially closed” because paving on the World’s Most Expensive Left Turn Lane has finally begun, and Aggrieved Andersonians are now desperately trying to find alternate routes to avoid that insidious intersection. 

Winner of this week’s longest suburban sojourn (a mere 5,124 miles one way) is Anderson’s own Revered Former Congressman Bob McEwen, who wound up in Tirana, Albania (wherever the hell that is) with MEP (Member European Parliament) and Brexit originator Daniel Hannan along with the heads of the various Conservative Parties of Europe for their “dance on the coffin” celebration of the demise of Communism. Those Leninist who shot their way into power in Russia, 100 years ago this fall.  

McEwen gave the keynote speech, as the American who escorted the world’s first non-communist leader of a Communist Country, Tadeusz Mazowieski, into the Polish chancellery for the first time, in August 1991. McEwen says they knew the Soviet Union must either kill or at least (again) imprison him, otherwise Communism as a political force in the world would end. 

Others speakers included John O’Sullivan, the author of “the President the Pope and the Prime Minister” and Thatcher deputy, along with Parliamentary members and Ministers who were enslaved and imprisoned under Communism from across Europe. The Summit was sponsored by the Conservative Parties of Europe. (Note: The backdrop is a replica of the Berlin Wall as seen from the West with its ant-communist graffiti.)

McEwen had participated in forming free governments in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungry, Romania and Albania and was introduced by Bob’s friend, former Defense Minister and head of the Albanian Republican Party, current Member of Parliament Fatmir Mideu. He and Bob founded the Republican party in Tirana, Albania 25 years ago.

When Gorbachev then failed to pull the trigger on Poland and roll the tanks as Khrushchev did on the uprisings in Hungary in 1956 and Brezhnev did in Czechoslovakia in 1968; the countries behind the Iron Curtain, stolen under the nose of Harry Truman’s feckless State Department following WWII, began in Sept and October of 1991 to declare their independence from the Soviet Union. 

Following this Polish example, those Eastern European dominoes continued to fall until the world watched the ultimate symbol of communism’s collapse; the destruction of the Berlin Wall only 10 weeks later. McEwen was a member of the American Delegation to the European Parliament for 10 years and continues to have many pro-American friends there.

Needless to say, there was a whole lot of cheering for President Trump’s Syrian Missile Strike this week.