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                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, March 19, 1993                   TAG: 9303190513
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

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MARCHING TOWARD `MOMMY' GOVERNMENT

IT IS HARD to believe the naivete of respected business people in your "At Home With the Voters" feature. Bill Simmons, a funeral home director, did have one thing correct in discussing President Clinton. He remarks that "[h]is talent is handling people - ordinary people."

Like other great "handlers" of people, such as Jim Bakker, Jim Jones, Marx, Lenin and the famous flim-flam men on late-night television pitching their "pie-in-the-sky" hopes, as long as there are innocent, idealistic people who continue to grasp for that invisible pie, these handlers are successful.

Clinton may be one of the most successful flim-flam salesmen yet. He wants to take away your individuality and hopes, and replace a government-for-the people with a people-for-the-government ideology.

As long as there are folks like the Simmonses who want government to do things for them rather than allow for a government that lets individuals think, achieve and succeed on their own, we will march closer to a lifestyle not wholly unlike the Soviet Union of the '50s and '60s.

Folks, that doesn't work. However, in 1917, I guess Russia had many folks as we do in present-day America who want government to be their mommies. JIM DOOLEY BLACKSBURG

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