DEAR EDITOR:
Mr. Mulhern, if you are sincere in your desire to avoid making
enemies of your political opponents, I strongly suggest that you
drop the
”
knuckle dragging
”
rhetoric.
DEAR EDITOR:
Mr. Mulhern, if you are sincere in your desire to avoid making enemies of your political opponents, I strongly suggest that you drop the “knuckle dragging” rhetoric. We conservative zealots are none too stable under the best of conditions and that kind of stuff sends us ballistic.
You might take inspiration from Ms. Pampuch’s column challenging my position on defense spending. She stated her points of disagreement and then offered supporting arguments for each point. I think she is wrong on most points, but the willingness to debate the issues was a real pleasure to see when compared to the contempt normally expressed by the rest of the liberal contingent.
You deny taking conservative property, money, and children. Perhaps I am wrongly tarring you with a liberal brush, but if you support zoning or environmental land use restrictions, you are taking our property in real estate. If you support current taxation levels of 35 percent of income for federal taxes and roughly 26 percent for state and local, you are taking our money.
Through most of the peace time history of the United States, federal taxes were about 5 percent, state and local taxes about 10 percent. (This was sufficient, by the way, to cover Ms. Pampuch’s list of imperatives.) If you support the growth control policies that increase my house payments by $6,000 per year, you are taking even more. If you support compulsory schooling and state controlled schools, you are taking our children.
I do not trust the Republican party leadership in general or the Bush II administration in particular. It’s irritating to be defending them, I’d much rather attack, but the your accusation that they intend to begin manufacturing biological and chemical weapons is unfair. Do you have any evidence that they intend to repudiate the biological and chemical weapons treaties, or is your comment just hatred speaking?
Likewise, your position on the nuclear first use policy is questionable. The United States has defensive obligations under the NATO, SEATO, and other treaties that can only be met by first use of nuclear weapons. Had the Soviets invaded Europe, our chance of stopping them with conventional forces was always exactly zero. The same applies to the Russians and Chinese today. Every administration from FDR to Bush I had a nuclear first use policy. I had not heard that Clinton reversed that policy, but it would not surprise me. He always was lousy at foreign policy. If Bush II has corrected a Clinton error, it is only one among many.
The commentary calling the U.S. Army “the most powerful military machine in the history of the world” isn’t true. It’s something that the liberal media trots out to reassure the masses whenever the Democrats are trying to cut defense appropriations.
Last time I checked, several years ago, the U.S. Army was rated seventh in the world. The Navy and the Air Force were rated much higher, but that was before the Clinton administration cut them all in half.
Stuart Allen, Gilroy
Saturday, April 26 to ed****@****ic.com
