‘Glaring Falsehoods’ in the Publisher’s Columns

To the Editor:
Ironically, in his Feb. 18 column, pondering the importance of morals and religion, Herald Publisher Art Hall stated: “As thinking human beings, we must challenge everything we are told in order to separate misconceptions and falsehoods from fact and truth.”
I couldn’t agree more. I also couldn’t help wonder when the publisher might get around to practicing what he preaches. On that note, I’d like to respectfully challenge some of the glaring falsehoods the publisher insists on perpetuating in his weekly column.
For starters, maybe it’s time that folks like Hall consider the very real possibility that Republicans didn’t take control of both houses of Congress based on any tangible mandate from the American people. Maybe we should seriously consider the fact that the Republicans’ congressional control has more to do with big money manipulation and voter redistricting.
Maybe that worn out, right wing “mandate” talking point is just as phony as the tortured tale of plastic bread bags over shoes in wintertime, told by newly-crowned Republican darling Senator Joni Ernst (Iowa) in her response to the president’s State of the Union address last month.
In truth, the Republican control is more demonstrative of how well fat cat-financed conservative leaders have been successful in hammering home their great deception.
Nearly $4 billion was spent on the 2014 midterms, shattering all records. Look no further than the industrialist billionaire brothers, David H. and Charles G. Koch, who intend to buy the presidency come 2016 with $889 million pledged to conservative candidates.
If you needed any further proof of new Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell’s and reappointed House majority leader John Boehner’s misappropriated priorities, consider their party’s first order of business just before Christmas, when Republicans successfully weakened safeguards against Wall Street recklessness and left the door wide open for even more dark money into campaign coffers.
In his Jan. 5 column, Hall printed his newspaper’s pledge statement and cited passages from George Washington’s 1796 farewell address, partly as a means to celebrate Republicans new found congressional control as “an important step in correcting the ills George Washington warned us of.”
Interestingly, however, in that same farewell address, Washington warned sternly against just the sort of unabashed political party allegiance that readers are routinely exposed to in the publisher’s columns.
In addressing the general dangers of political parties, Washington stated, “Let me now take a more comprehensive view and warn you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”
In so many respects, the Republican Party arguably has become that vengeful, self-serving, power-mongering entity that Washington warned us about. From the get-go, ever since Barack Obama was sworn in January 2008, the right has been working to undermine, not facilitate.
The crime of it of course, was that the Republicans’ sheer political partisanship came at one of the most trying times in American history since the 1929 Great Depression. At a time when the American people needed their representatives to look out for their interests – while millions of citizens were losing their homes, jobs and essentially their lives – the right played politics.
Then Senate minority leader McConnell stated at the time that his and the Republicans’ number one goal was to make Obama a one-term president.
Hall also quotes Washington’s warning against, “cunning, ambitious and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the powers of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government.”
Now, let’s be real. If you had to pick one, which political party does that sound like?