The Looney Left of Massachusetts

One of the wacky things about the Boston Globe is the strange choice of letters to the editor which end up published. Letters expressing conservative points of view are often borderline illiterate. Here is one published today from the Looney Left of Massachusetts, which is simply shocking for its lack of thought. It reads:

"Terrorism is not an enemy; it is a tactic that relies on creating fear in its targets. In this sense, there is little difference between Vice President Dick Cheney threatening us with attack if we vote the wrong way and Osama bin Laden threatening us with attack if we do not do as he says.

The Bush/Cheney Crips and the bin Laden Bloods have a lot in common. They both threaten us with death/destruction if we do not do as they wish.

Franklin D. Roosevelt said, memorably, 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.' There were many things to fear in 1933: unemployment, poverty, hunger, a failing economy, Nazis, genocide. But Roosevelt's point was valid then, and it is valid now. The enemy cannot defeat us but fear can, by paralyzing us and making our lives into a nightmare.

A nation that lives in fear, although physically intact, is a nation vanquished. If we allow either gang to do this to us, we have lost the fight."

So in the mind (such as it is!) of this poor lady there is little to distinguish between a dictator who builds a Stalinesque terror state over 20 years while killing more than 1 million of its citizens out of paranoia and pure sadism, a terrorist who is responsible for the murder of thousands of westerners simply because they were regarded as Infidels, and Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States. Sadly, this lady is not able to draw the simplest of distinctions.

"Is it not curious, that so vast a being as the whale should see the world through so small an eye, and hear the thunder through an ear which is smaller than a hare's? But if his eyes were broad as the lens of Herschel's great telescope; and his ears capacious as the porches of cathedrals; would that make him any longer of sight, or sharper of hearing? Not at all.- Why then do you try to "enlarge" your mind? Subtilize it."
-- Melville