Ralph Ginzburg is Dead

Barry Goldwater

As the title indicates, the reason for the old feeder writing this morning was the news that Ralph Ginzburg has died in New York. I suppose it dates me a bit, but when I read of his passing, I couldn't help but think of Senator Barry Goldwater. Hence the campaign poster. What a different world we would be living in today had he been elected president in 1964. ¡Ai, mi cabeza! What does Barry G's '64 campaign have to do with Ginzburg croaking? Read on.

Commies, sexual hedonists, and weirdos that still read that other Ginzberg will mourn the creepy looking stationery store and luncheonette operator who got jammed up for selling two 'girlie magazines' to a 16 year old boy. He later became what he called a "brandied fruitcake of a publisher." Some cats credit this artless creep with fathering the '60's sexual revolution. His admirers praise him as an iconoclast (then oddly go on to call him an icon). He most notably published two hard cover, but hardly hard core, magazines, Eros and Fact.

I shoulda checked his ID

Mr. Ginsburg published a sort of 'fake but accurate' story in his Fact magazine a month before the 1964 election entitled: 1,189 Psychiatrists Say Goldwater Is Unfit To Be President!" For this, Barry sued Ralph for libel and actually won. The Supreme Court denied certiorari in this opinion, interesting mainly for the dissent. The vindication of Goldwater's sanity came too late to make any difference in the '64 election. Lyndon Johnson, the perpetrator of the Great Society, would have won anyhow.
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Fuggedabout Ginzburg, you won't see him no more. Read or listen to Senator Goldwater's great "Extremism in the Defense of Liberty Is No Vice" speech from the 1964 Republican convention at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.