DEAR EDITOR:
Mr. Mulhern, you chastise me, but I accuse you of being guilty
of your own chastisement.
DEAR EDITOR:
Mr. Mulhern, you chastise me, but I accuse you of being guilty of your own chastisement. If I may paraphrase your plaintive, gentle call: “Conservative scum! We of liberal mind seek peace, freedom, and reasoned discourse, so you all just shut up, do what we tell you, and quit whining when we take your money, your property, and your children!”
If you can muster any empathy for your opponents, please consider the difficulty of remaining polite when the other side exaggerates an innocuous statement to the point of absurdity, as you have done to Ms. Walker, ignores fact in favor of fancy, see below, and, occasionally, lies their collective behinds off.
In your column, you charged the United States with having the greatest collection of WMDs the world has ever seen including gas, MOABs, ICBMs, and biological agents. Your charge is, in the sense that you meant it, groundless and false. For your information, the United States ceased production of unitary chemical and biological weapons in 1969, during the Nixon Administration. All stocked biological munitions were destroyed by 1972. Ninety percent of chemical munitions were destroyed by a Congressional order in 1985. The balance, along with mothballed production facilities, will be eliminated by 2007 in accordance with the Chemical Weapons Convention negotiated by Bush I and signed by Clinton. The United States has had an official “no first use” policy on chemical weapons since the Roosevelt Administration.
The MOAB, or massive ordinance air-blast bomb, nicknamed “mother of all bombs” by aficionados, is in development and, as far as I know, not yet deployed. ICBMs we certainly have, but not nearly so many as before SALT I and SALT II. The USSR had, at one time, more by far than we ever did.
If you ever acquire an interest in checking your facts before publishing them, it is very simple. I found the above information in about 20 minutes on the Internet with a dial-up connection. Imagine what one could do with DSL, broadband, or even a passing interest in the truth.
To wit: The position that we should spend more money on education without extensive management reform when expenditures are already at record high levels and performance rivals the worst in the world really is simpleminded.
Finally, to wit: We do not have enough bombs. If you look carefully, you will find that our military logistical support has been severely strained by Serbia, about the size and population of New Hampshire, Afghanistan, about the size of Texas, and Iraq, smaller and weaker than California. If we are seriously challenged by a varsity opponent like Russia, China, Germany, or the European Union, we stand a pretty fair chance of getting our bums kicked.
Believe it.
Stuart Allen, Gilroy
Submitted Wednesday, April 16 to ed****@****ic.com
