Editor:
The entire Democratic party has gone berserk, including Representative Jared Huffman (“In The Wake of Helsinki,” July 26). Instead of trying to influence policy on rampant environmental destruction, military expansion, increasing income inequality, effects of drug war, etc., it is expending its entire resources trying to drag down the president. Huffman accuses Trump of treason (“Manchurian candidate”) and cowardice (“bowing and scraping” to Putin).
President Trump wants to have peaceful relations with Russia. He said so in his campaign. This position alone made him tremendously popular in Russia.
Russia is tightly encircled by NATO troops. They are in Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. They are conducting 106 military exercises on Russia’s border this year, with the Anakonda maneuvers including a preemptive strike involving more than 100,00 soldiers. “We will see preparation for a great war,” proclaims NATO.
Our missile shield was switched on in 2016. Our refusal to dismantle this was one of the reasons the Reykjavik nuclear peace talks broke down in 1986.
Gorbachev agreed to German reunification after U.S. Secretary of State James Baker made an “iron-clad agreement” not to move NATO “1 inch eastward.” That promise was broken in three months.
The Russian election interference issue is hypocrisy and a red herring. It’s now obvious that everybody hacks and meddles, ourselves worst of all (the Ukrainian upheaval being a prime example). It is also insulting to our voters.
The indictment of Russia for taking Crimea back is also meddling, as Krushchev’s gift of it to Ukraine in 1954 (Krushchev loved Ukraine and spent much of his life there) was questionably legal and has been controversial ever since.
It is Huffman who is “bowing and scraping” to the insane policy decisions of the Democrats. Trump is working toward peace, the most important objective of all.
Ellen Taylor, Petrolia
This article appears in The Flower Dancers.
I’d say that he’s “working towards peace” to about the same degree as you are in this letter. And all I’m seeing from you is a mishmash of schoolyard insults and ad hominem tu quoque (or, to put it in simpler terms, “I know you are but what am I” presented as an argument).
And then, there’s the utter credulity regarding the word of someone who’s repeatedly proven himself to be fundamentally and abjectly dishonest. Really: anyone who still sincerely believes any of what you’ve claimed here would have to be deeply in denial.
I suppose had someone sent a letter to a small-town paper in August of 1938, supporting Germany’s annexation of the Sudetenland, the injustice of the Treaty of Versailles, ranting against the Democratic Party and its local politicians, that editor could have published it in the interest of free speech. However, four years later, I think not so much!
My concern with this piece isn’t only that it contained a particularly insidious narrative that cleverly mixed historical truths and rhetorical devices, but also that it had environmental undertones entirely absent from mainstream Republican dogma. Likely designed to win over the kind of clueless tree-hugging activists this area is know for, let us not forget that had not the Independent Left largely sat out this last election, Trump would have never been elected.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the cornerstone of post WWII security in Europe, but how does a knave from Petriolia know the exact number of NATO military exercises? This Ellen Taylor seems very versed in Russian history, but the cherry-picked version we got does not include their murderous suppression of the press, LBGT rights, and political dissent. By no means a “Red Herring”, I would call how the Russians intervened in our 2016 elections, and the possibility that the Republicans and the National Rifle Association (NRA) helped them a clear and present danger to our Republic.
Incidentally, Anaconda, as in a South American species of python snake is spelled with a “c”, but in Russia its spelled with a “k”, which makes me question if this letter shouldn’t more correctly have been signed Yelena Taylor, or .
Wow – Ellen Taylor has drunk the Kool Aid. Trump is lining his pockets and those of the one-percenters. He is not working towards peace – he is trying to establish a dictatorship in the US and the obvious hacking of the US election in his favor is a high crime with ties to Trump’s campaign. His military spending continues a trend of increasing the amount that the US tax payers pay out to the military contractors – making obscene amounts of money for the CEOs and shareholders of those corporations at the expense of our social programs and infrastructure. Trump won’t release his tax returns because he doesn’t want us to know how deep his financial interests and ties to Russia are. His antics are a big distraction so we don’t notice how he is dismantling the financial and environmental regulatory systems and shifting even more wealth from the 99% to the 1%. I can’t believe that anyone thinks Trump is sincerely working toward peace – that seems extremely naive and I am surprised to hear that from Ellen Taylor. Maybe her identity was hacked and someone else posted that comment – it doesn’t sound like previous letters I’ve seen from her.
Working Toward Peace
Today, the 73rd anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, is testimonial to the overriding issue of world peace. In this context, when President Trump meets with Putin in friendship, or for that matter with Kim Jong Un, his misbehavior is completely beside the point.
Presently President Trump has about 90% backing from the Republicans. They are forced on to the defensive by the Democrats focused attack on Trump personally. Their jeering ridicules those who voted for him as well. And it probably obliges them to support policies of the administration which they would otherwise reject.
I suspect many upper-echelon Democrats are secretly delighted with how the Trump administration is enriching them. They havent even begun to field a candidate for the next presidential election. But to hear Senator Duckworth, a Democrat, freak out at the idea of the US withdrawing troops from Korea, a dream and aspiration of all Koreans, and to hear of our own Representative Huffman belittling Trumps moves toward peace, when he should be enthusiastically endorsing them, thus slowing the Doomsday clock, is evidence that our nation is going grievously insane.
I hate to interrupt Ms. Taylor’s Mussolini cosplay, but I don’t think we’ve seen such treasonous drivel since Benedict Arnold tried to hand over West Point to the British. Hello?… the Revolutionary War called, it wants its rhetoric back, because in case you haven’t heard, Great Britain are our friends now; WWI, WWII, the Cold War, remember?
Lucky 007 dropped the dime on this Manchurian Candidate of ours, but do you really think a guy that cheats on his wife with porn stars, and pays them off with hundreds of thousands of dollars wouldn’t consort with urinating Russian prostitutes? How blind can you be? Oh, I get it, he’s your hero and can do nothing wrong. Like a favorite Uncle, that takes you to Disneyland, and molests your sister.
Indeed, this person’s comment reads more like a veiled threat than memorial to Hiroshima. “Be nice to Putin, or he will nuke us all”. No doubt, let us have no illusions about the desperation of a nation with a GNP several times smaller than Italy, and the distinct threat that all their oligarchs ill begotten wealth that is stored overseas may be forfeited. Lastly, how stupid do you have be to fall for that N.Korean lies, again? Maybe we ask the Japanese how they feel about Kim Jong-un?
Thank you Ms. Taylor for another insightful editorial of the bigger picture and larger context widely self-censored in today’s press, your well-informed views are especially annoying to those who dislike anyone that takes their citizenship seriously.
Thank you for that too.
With a misanthrope for president, democratic victories should be overwhelming, instead, the primaries are promising narrow gains this November.
Following 40 years of complicity in, and compromise with, the republican agenda of job exports, offshore tax havens, mass-deregulation, mass-privatization, mass-public divestment, mass-corporate bailouts, mass-incarceration, perpetual wars for oil…and the plethora of imperial interventions abroad, covert, overt, hot, cold and tepid…
…The DNC sees no alternative to their anti-Trump strategy, a president they helped elect.
It’s not too late to return the party to its roots by adopting Bernie Sander’s platform and begin earning-back some of the 70% of U.S. adults who never vote, described by Jimmy Carter as “the greatest threat to democracy” in his 1979 “Energy Independence” speech.
Unfortunately, returning to a party of the working people with an unprecedented nationwide voter registration drive is anathema to the millionaires in Congress beholden to the highest bidders and the military industrial complex.
Change must begin in our communities where we find our own corrupt developers
and entrenched elites, like Trump, dominating nearly every elected and appointed office.