Letter: Thanking the Robin Nadeaus of the World

Edward A. Slavin Jr.
St. Augustine
Published Monday, February 16, 2004

Editor: As Ross Perot warned 12 years ago, that "giant sucking sound" we hear is that of American jobs being sucked out of our economy. Even computer and accounting jobs are being shipped offshore. More jobs were lost under George W. "Shrub" Bush than under any president since Herbert Hoover.

Our American jobs, democracy, civil rights and environment are being destroyed.

Millions of jobs are being exported to fatten greedy corporations. The informed American people see right through them.

Enough.

Thank you, Ms. Robin Nadeau, for your perceptive letter quoting Lincoln on "the money power."

Faster than a speeding tree killer's dump truck, with cliches by the carload, an unhappy Mr. Stewart R. Canfield wrote Feb. 3, condemning "the Robin Nadeaus of the world" for disagreeing with him, praising Bush for protecting "the strong," smirkily adding "Bush won."

Unfairly demanding unearned respect for President G.W. Bush, Mr. Canfield has written disrespectful letters full of swagger, accusing FDR of "Marxism," complaining of "Bush-bashing," stating that some of America's "enemies" are "walking the halls of Congress," and complaining about "bellyaching of NAACP and the Democrats" about the 2000 election.

Mr. Canfield's uninformed, irascible views are mostly intolerant and uncivil. Lincoln was no "woman." Mr. Canfield is no gentleman.

As Christians, let's forgive his Philistinism but expose his errors.

Our Constitution, in its majesty, protects Mr. Canfield's free speech rights -- rights that he disrespects whenever exercised by better-informed people who disagree with him.

As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer wrote, "All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed, second it is violently opposed, and third, it is accepted as self-evident."

Thank God for "the Robin Nadeaus of the world who care more for working people than war profiteers.

The 2000 election was stolen, with Justice Scalia's 37-year-old son Eugene Scalia named as Department of Labor solicitor (thankfully the Senate never confirmed the antiworker corporate lawyer, and he quit in a huff last year).

The 2000 presidential election was decided by a partisan 5-4 vote of the U.S. Supreme Court, which erred when it voted to halt the Florida recounts.

Nationwide, Bush lost the popular vote by 500,000 votes. Bush would have lost the Electoral College but for flummery, chicanery and bullying, including imported Republican thugs from Washington, D.C., Congressional offices who terrorized voting officials in South Florida.

Surly sloganeers attack talk of equal legal rights as "class warfare."

Those who steal from the poor to give to the rich are the real "class warfare" warriors -- "Robin Hoods in reverse." Their money talks. This dangerous control of our government by the "money power" is indefensible and must be ended at once.

Snooty Bush is oblivious to our troops, veterans and their families.

They are merely "photo op" objects to him, the military instruments of his failed policies. Of 537 federally elected officials, only one has a son or daughter soldiering in Iraq. My late father perceptively called George W. Bush a "phony." (My father was a World War II paratrooper, for whom the 82nd Airborne Assn Southern New Jersey Chapter is named.)

Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Barry Goldwater and other honest Republicans would vote Democratic today, just as Vermont Sen. James Jeffords left the Republican Party in 2001 over its control by arrogant CEOs.

Vote principles over party. It is time for Bush/Cheney and company to pack and ride off into the sunset, without a pardon.