Posted 6:10 PM by Floyd

Just one more post about the Mercury News and then it's time for me to try out my Egyptian tanks ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H clean the mud tracks on the floor. Here is a letter to the editor published today:

Consider the costs

JUDGING by the polls and recent elections, it appears that President Bush enjoys a fairly high level of approval in the United States. However, I wonder if Americans have looked carefully at the consequences of the Bush administration policies.

Do Americans really want to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on a war with Iraq, suffer the loss of hundreds or thousands of American lives, and further alienate the rest of the world, and encourage hundreds to join Al-Qaida, in an attempt to remove Saddam Hussein from power?

Saddam cannot dare to use weapons of mass destruction because he knows that if he did, there would be an overwhelming retaliation from the United States. All of the rhetoric suggests that Bush has little faith in the U.N. inspections, and that he will order military action on the slightest provocation.

Are most Americans satisfied with the state of the economy, the cost and availability of health care, and are they willing to accelerate a huge tax cut largely for the wealthy? Are they willing to ignore the effects of global warming and depletion of natural resources on the quality of life that will be available to their grandchildren?

Mel Rabedeau
Saratoga

I could subject Rabedeaubedeau to a little fisking, but the use of that verb makes Colby Cosh mad. Anyway I'm happy that he's not threatening to lower his cholesterol count unless George Bush acceeds to his demands.

What really burns me up is that the Merc printed a letter that claimed, without documentation, that a war on Iraq would cost hundreds of billions of dollars. This is close to being absurd on the face of it; the entire military budget is a few hundred billion dollars, and only a portion of that can be spent on a specific campaign. Does Rabedeau think that a US-Iraq war will last as long as World War II?

Do I think the Mercury News should censor Rabedeau? No, but I think they are hypocrites, because of the way they treated me the last time I sent in a letter to the editor. A few years I objected to a letter-writer who said that the South Vietnamese in America who hate Vietnam were sore losers. I emailed a letter to the editor:

Al Traugott (Letters to the Editor March 24) complains
that Vietnamese protestors of a Ho Chi Minh exhibit are
sore losers. This is ridiculous and ignorant. The
Communist regime of Ho Chi Minh killed a million people
through slave labor and direct executions.

When Saigon fell there was widespread terror. Vietnamese
fled the country as if they were being pursued by flesh-
eating zombies. They undertook long ocean voyages in
small craft. Hundreds of thousands drowned.

The treatment of the South Vietnamese was not an inevitable
consequence of war. When the Confederacy lost the American
civil war, the losers were bitter. However, the Southern
rebels knew that they would not be summarily executed or
enslaved, and so we do not hear tales of people fleeing on
leaky boats over the Gulf of Mexico.

Traugott excuses the Communist crimes by claiming that
the losers were "naturally treated harshly". I would like
to think that most Mercury News readers do not think
the murder of a million people is a natural occurence.

I got a phone call from an editor who said they couldn't publish the letter unless I documented my claims that of Communist murders! I was able to satisfy him by referring him to James Rummel's "death by government" website.

It's obvious to me that the Merc is selective in choosing which letters to fact-check. All part of the right-wing fifth column decried by Al Gore, I guess.