In Which I Berate an Editor

Nolan Finley is the editorial page editor of the Detroit News.  His column in today's combined News - Free Press, titled Democrats Gorge on Absolute Power is the sort of idiocy one would expect from a right-wing ideologue.   Have a look at the link above.

I sent the following to him in a e-mail, just moments ago.

Dear Mr. Finley -

Evidently you have spent the first decade of this century living on some other planet.  It looks like you don't remember the not-so-distant past when Democrats were excluded from policy discussions, unable to obtain a room to hold a meeting, and literally had the lights turned out on them when they did find an abandoned room in a basement somewhere.  Until you see the Democrats wielding their power along those lines, you owe your readers a retraction and an apology for spewing your misleading dreck onto their Sunday paper.

What those of us who reside on this planet saw was President Obama's futile efforts to bring nay-saying Republicans into the health-care process.  Alas, they were too caught up in lies about death panels and a forged Kenyan birth certificate to participate.  And if you'd stop to think for a minute you'd realize that if there even were a Left in this country, single-payer health care would have been central to the discussion, not something thrown to the curb before the discussion even got going.

Since your mind-set is Democrat = Left, you are blind to the reality that Obama, and most Democrats are Center-Right conservatives.  Similarly, you must believe that Republican = Right, when, in reality, the Republicans have sailed off the rational political map into a territory where they only know hatred and negativity.  And don't give me any hog-wash about fiscal responsibility, either.  I'll let Bruce Bartlett disabuse you of that mistaken notion.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/11/19/republican-budget-hypocrisy-health-care-opinions-columnists-bruce-bartlett.html

Your last paragraph implies that the Democrats are able to act with single-minded unity.  The reality is that only Republicans are sufficiently anti-democratic to place party above principle and country, while the Democrats scatter like dust in the wind.

Your article has some basis in fact, but you twist those facts into something horribly misleading.  What ideology do you adhere to, that contorts truths into falsehood in service of a pre-conceived notion?  Alas, Mr. Finley, you have forced me to conclude that you are either a scoundrel or a fool.  What a pity that you have column space in the Free Press, if only once a week.

Very truly yours,

JazzBumpa

Update:  In a one line response sent at 2:35 P.M., Mr. Finley reminds me that every bill passed during the Bush administration had some democratic support.  Though his point is spectacularly irrelevant, I sent him this reply:

Thank you for an interesting fact that supports my case, not yours.

As I said, dust in the wind.

And, by way of contrast, you will see this Democratic administration come and go with the vast majority of bills passing over unified opposition from the totally unprincipled party of "No!"   Content doesn't matter - only being opposed.

Cheers!
 JzB

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