DEAR EDITOR:
We have been down this road before, riding Ms. Walker’s red
herring express.
DEAR EDITOR:
We have been down this road before, riding Ms. Walker’s red herring express. A ride we take each time Ms. Walker feels she must say something, but she is unable to fend off the rebuttal and defend herself or even explain her views. If Ms. Walker’s self-promotion is to be believed that she is qualified to teach logic, then the question is why would she continually resort to such a diversionary tactic as the red herring fallacy?
The first attempt to intimidate me with a grammatical red herring was back on September 10, 1999. I remember it like it was yesterday. In fact it was yesterday that I pulled it out from my reference files. Three fourths of the column was wasted on the attempt. Then there was that gem on March 10, 2000. “I have 40 more words with which to rebut Mr. Harold Williams’ letter of Feb. 18th. Mr. Williams, as usual, you misunderstand me. I will try to be more clear. You are rude. I do not tell lies. You do not make much sense.”
There maybe one clue as to why Ms. Walker resorts to diversionary tactics rather than confronting the issues.
As she suggested in her column on Oct. 13, 2000, in a side note to “… Mr. Mitchell. I notice you are not responding to my substantive points. Therefore, I assume that you agree with me …” Equating no response to submission and diversion and non-acknowledgement as saving face.
In Ms. Walker’s Aug. 3 attempt to ridicule me over alleged grammatical error, the letter was reviewed regarding Ms. Walker’s Aug. 30 column in order to find the alleged misquote. All I found was that I had indeed left out the quotation mark that would have closed the quote that I had borrowed. “… boyfriend, now husband (“) Stuart Allen who was on his own quest for “truth”.
I could have, and maybe should have, left the quotations off, making it a paraphrase. So there was no intended misquote, only a typo on my part. However, Ms. Walker did misquote me with intent, she put a twisted spin on my closing paragraph when she stated “For example, your last sentence seems to state that liberals have over-inflated ego.” With the last paragraph stated was, “When I got down to the final analysis, the only thing that divides conservatives and liberals here is their personal opinions and over-inflated egos.”
My letter was an analysis on Ms. Walker’s transformation from a liberal with an inflated ego, to a conservative with an inflated ego.
From that I made a generalized conclusion, that what divides conservatives and liberals is their personal opinions and what keeps them divided is their over-inflated egos.
Harold D. Williams, Hollister
Submitted Thursday, Oct. 10