Published: July 08, 2009 07:52 am      

Letters to the Editor: July 8, 2009

Throwing mud avoids the issues

Andy Mason's most recent vitriolic letter about Sen. Seward ("entrenched in a slime pit" I believe were his words) shows that those frustrated at the ballot box have to resort to invective and smears. Issues are irrelevant to partisans like Andy. Just throw mud, declare guilt by association and call names. Real classy. When you can't win on issues, throw cow dung on someone's character.

Mason tries to smear Sen. Seward for, among other things, the fact that Seward's predecessor as chairman of the Senate Insurance Committee went to jail. How is that relevant? Maybe someone who owned Andy Mason's truck before he did committed a crime. Would that make Andy a criminal?

Mason attacks Seward because two Democratic senators with ethics joined Republicans to flip the Senate. Odd. Andy never wrote a letter to the editor complaining when they were allied with Senate Democrats, and provided a Democrat-dominated state government that gave us a budget in secret, a 10 percent hike in state spending, $6 billion in new taxes and legislation about to drive local jobs and brewers right out of Otsego County!

For two decades, Andy Mason has been penning poisonous letters about Seward because Seward doesn't buy into Mason's extreme environmental views. Andy just hasn't accepted the fact that Jim Seward won last year's race with nearly 70 percent of the vote against an opponent financed by out-of-state and party special interests.

Andy, stick to the issues. Leave the cowpies in the pasture where they belong.

Kellie Place

Oneonta

History shows path to self-destruction

Recent letters to The Daily Star have taken turns blaming various presidents for the state of the U.S. economy. The fact of the matter is that government always grows unless it can be in some way prevented from doing so. The Founders, who had the advantage of having to deal with absolute monarchs, were determined that the U.S. government would not be able to achieve that level of power over its citizens. A system of checks and balances has generally worked fairly well until recent times.

World War I changed Europe, created the Soviet Union and bankrupted Germany and started the Great Depression. Similar plans for solving the problems caused by the financial crisis were developed in Germany, Italy, England, Russia, Argentina, the U.S. and other countries. They varied from outright total control of all of the means of production, as in the Soviet Union, to mixed socialism and capitalism in most of the West. The German National Socialist (Nazi) party left the means of production in private hands so long as production was controlled by the all-powerful state. This led to a pact between the Soviets and Nazis to invade and divide Poland, leading to World War II. Over time it was discovered that those policies led to poverty and war. The Nazis ended up destroying much of Europe, the Soviet Union became a world military power that took 70 years to self-destruct, and Argentina has never recovered its former place as one of the world's great powers.

Will national socialism and sharing the wealth destroy the U.S.? If it does, neither political party will escape blame and neither will an electorate that fails to understand history.

Gerard Bourgeois

Morris