What Would the Tabloids Do Without the Royals?

Argument
8,758 against hereditary monarchs…

The royal family, and especially
Prince Philip, the queen’s husband, has
committed an array of gaffes. Prince Philip reinforced his reputation
for ill-chosen utterances in 1997 when he addressed Chancellor Helmut
Kohl of Germany as Reichskanzler – the title used by Hitler.

Not only that. As The Evening Standard, among other newspapers, noted
on Thursday, the royal family had an ambiguous relationship with Germany
and
the Nazis. The House of Windsor was formed in 1917 when the royal family
changed its name from Saxe-Coburg Gotha, a name it acquired with the
marriage in 1840 of Queen Victoria and Albert of Saxe-Coburg, which
was then a duchy
in central Germany.

In the 1930’s, moreover, some members were widely seen as openly sympathetic
to the Nazis. In one iconic photograph, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor,
smiling broadly, were seen greeting Hitler.

from the New
York Times

Hey, just because his family comes from Germany and was chummy with
Der Fuehrer, and he likes dressing up in Nazi regalia, that doesn’t make
him
a Neo-Nazi, or a Nazi sympathizer or anything. Even the Jewish grandson of
a haberdasher who lost family in the Holocaust can admit they had the snappiest
uniforms since the Roman Legion.