Democrats, yell more! There’s an urgent need for strong attacks against, not only Trump, but the GOP MAGA extremists who are trying to take over our country and have dragged over almost half of our population to vote Republican. This is incomprehensible. They want to take over our lives pretty much totally: control over our bodies, lovers, books, schools, workplace safety, health care, programs for our children and elderly, the environment, and more. Just check your Thom Hartmann for a comprehensive list. (“Are GOP governors killing their citizens to protect billionaires?” 8/15/23 TPP).
Good bye Social Security — you sleep on the sofa because Mom/Dad have to take over your bedroom. Good bye Medicare and the elderly die of medical bankruptcy. Goodbye the Postal Service, the EPA, gun reform. Hospitals are already closing down their maternity wards and doctors are leaving the red states for fear of litigation and jail time.
The Democrats should be yelling about all the bad things the Republicans plan to do. The decent Republicans are bombarded with misinformation, fear tactics, and their own denial of where the GOP has gone. They don’t hear all the good things done by the Dems for us now, in the past, and plans for the future.
The Dems. should be yelling: How can anyone vote Republican?
Respectfully,
GRACE GAMBINO, Jacksonville, Fla.
The Washington Post article, “Putin’s Russia gives textbooks a makeover” (reprinted in the Minneapolis Star Tribune Aug. 14) means what, that only Putin is wrong for giving textbooks a makeover?
The article acknowledges that all countries do this — but Russia does it the worst!
It is not Russian textbooks that have been injected with “national ideology” since 2003, claiming they were “in war” with Iraqis (who were simply minding their own business) “in war” with them and having the freedom to kill them and Iraqis to defend themselves, Iraqis living on oil-rich land.
Who’s “part of an extraordinary gaslighting campaign in which they continue to try and convince their own people — and the world — that they are the victim rather than the aggressor” … in Iraq?
“And that they were not at fault for a ‘war’” that Bush, Biden and Cheney “chose to unleash.”
A school history teacher in Russia, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said, “We have to understand that this is wider than schools, universities will be next.”
Well, if this is the future for Russian universities, they are only following America’s playbook, because universities here in the US have been teaching for two decades that the US attack upon Iraq was a “bad idea” and/or a “strategic mistake,” but also was a “war.” And here’s the magical part that the state-controlled professors in US academia cannot explain — the “war” absorbs all the wrongdoing. Everyone is free and clear. It was a “war.”
Who’s gaslighting whom? Game’s over.
FRANK ERICKSON, Minneapolis, Minn.
Just how many more societal virtues are to be abandoned and negated within our interactions with fellow “human beings”? It certainly has been substantiated throughout much of our nation/world that our reversion to a more “mammalian violent nature” by growing numbers of men committing “mass killings” and more violent crimes worldwide has occurred within our multiple cultures. The more scathing and outlandish actions by growing numbers of today’s “religious entities” has recently been exposed in a multitude of books, editorials and subscriptions pertinent ot “cult mentalities” contrary to the biblical tenets, precepts and homilies, including the misogynistic mindedness of preachers’ and priests’ antithetical thinking regarding feminist participation within religious positions of authority.
We’ve got various denominations breaking up because of their extreme and divisive views totally in contrast to the Bible’s aforementioned values, virtues and a disregard for our humanity itself.
This issue is now worthy of societal consideration and involvement as our political realm is now resembling the replication of the Third Reich form of dictatorial governance aligned with fascist oligarchs in their dictatorial dictates in lieu of negotiated reasoned outcomes.
As an approaching nonagenarian (2024), I’ve never witnessed the level of “hate, hell and harm” that was associated with history’s “religious crusades” thousands of years ago having a similar potential in today’s world of “mammalian instincts” of men.
FRANK ROHRIG, Milford, Conn.
Some young upstarts like the pundit David Ignatius have demanded that the president step aside so that a younger man can pick up the torch. For me, the salient question is what is stopping a candidate from the president’s party to step forward and challenge him? In 1968, Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota challenged President Johnson and, after McCarthy made a respectable showing in New Hampshire, which LBJ won easily nevertheless, Johnson dropped out shortly thereafter. If some senator or governor within the president’s party thinks that the time is nigh for a change of leadership, let’s hear about it. In the interim, let’s not speak in the hypothetical.
STEVEN ROSENZWEIG, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Robert Kennedy Jr. offers (with the exception of his stance on COVID) common sense too rarely heard in our political arena. With reference to the war in Ukraine, he pointed out that our government has contributed to its circumstances by extending NATO to Russia’s borders, something that we would never tolerate if it occurred on our borders. Ukraine has now been turned into a pawn in a proxy war between the US and Russia, and as that war escalated, direct contact and the dangers of a nuclear war increases. As his uncle, John F. Kennedy said, no nation should be forced to choose between humiliating defeat or nuclear war.
On the home front, violence has overtaken us within our own borders. Mass shootings, decaying economic infrastructure, toxins in air, soil and water, coupled with a breakdown of our mental and physical health are destroying the American people.
Kennedy’s speech received no attention in mainstream media, as the Democratic Party establishment simply ignored him and all other challengers. Some Democratic voters see this and, as a result, will choose not to vote at all, myself included.
Any so-called legislations by President Biden do nothing to address the deep anger voters feel by he system being rigged against them, that benefit only those in power (both Republican and Democrat), who refuse to leave the power of their office.
Big money and its paybacks continue to dominate our politics, while corporations profit from corruption. Wars that never end consume resources while leaving human wreckage in their wake. And on foreign policy, Biden launched into a new cold war with both China and Russiam continuing the forever wars with our bloated and fiscally irresponsible military.
Kennedy may be flawed with controversial ideas, but he taps a nerve in all of us because he speaks the truth.
ANITA and RICK GRIFFITH, Vermilion, Ill.
An open letter to Speaker Kevin McCarthy: nnYou’ve created a dilemma for yourself on the Budget resolution. While you gave extremist radicals everything they asked for, they still refuse to govern responsibly. Although you and the President made an agreement to avoid US debt default, the extremists wanted you to dishonor the deal with new spending cuts ... and you complied! Nevertheless, your party’s ideologues refuse to fund the government. You yielded to their irresponsible calls to waste time and resources for impeachment without credible evidence, yet those radical Republicans still refuse to support serious governing.
There’s a way out of this dilemma caused by your bad choices. Propose a clean, fully-funded Continuing Resolution with no political stunts riding in sidecars. Surely, you can find four reasonable Republicans (plus yourself) to vote with the Democrats and keep our government going.
That’s what real governing, real leadership, would look like.
BRUCE JOFFEE, Piedmont, Calif.
The MAGA branch says “Yes, the election was stolen form Trump, and no, climate change is a hoax.” If we think about this, how many climate scientists, when questioned, have taken the Fifth Amendment?
PAUL BENSON, Hawarden, Iowa
From The Progressive Populist, October 15, 2023
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