Editor:
Tiara Fuller is right (“Democrats hate America,” Sept. 17).
Certainly, the language and rhetoric used by MoveOn.org is questionable. The fact that they “slandered” an accomplished man such as Gen. Petraeus is objectionable to be certain, but no more objectionable than the fact that numerous Republican candidates have taken massive donations from defense contractors, who are reaping massive profits from a war which has cost the lives of more than 3,700 American men and women serving bravely in the armed forces of the United States.
It seems that prolonging the war and putting more money into the pockets of their supporters is more important to the Republican Party than the scores of single parents who have lost husbands and wives in Fallujah and Baghdad.
It’s too bad, however, that Fuller can’t come up with any better assault on the Democratic Party than the same vitriol that pundits like Ann Coulter and Bill O’Reilly have been using for years. Lumping the Democratic Party with the likes of bin Laden is a pathetic rhetorical stroke that only serves to insult the intelligence of millions of Americans who voted against the Republican Party in 2006. And certainly, the reason that many of us voted against a bloated and affluent Republican leadership is because they betrayed us, as an electorate that trusted them, by lying their way into a conflict which has served no greater purpose than to ensure that the ledgers of Halliburton and other oil and defense corporations grow fat off the blood spilled by both Iraqis and Americans.
Fuller’s pathetic notion of “supporting the troops,” when it comes right down to it, is keeping them in Iraq to die in unconscionable numbers while no improvement to the domestic crisis — the civil war, if you will — occurs. Our notion of troop support, as progressives who are tired of wasteful Republic autocracy, is to get our boys and girls in blue out of harm’s way so that they can get back to what is truly important in American life: freedom from the constraints imposed by demagogues who have manipulated this nation for the last seven-and-a-half years.
It isn’t that the Democratic Party is benefiting from failure in Iraq; it’s that the failure in Iraq has exposed fallacious Republican logic for what it is: truly damaging to the American citizenry at large and the international community as a whole.
Matthew Oliver Senior, Communications
Ryan Bettilyon Senior, Marketing
Adam Taylor Senior, Graphic Design
Benjamin JohnsonSophomore, Philosophy