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Political rhetoric

A reader (March 12) recently expressed her disappointment with Sen. Pat Toomey’s performance at the Senate impeachment trial. She informed Toomey that Trump had perpetrated “traitorous, deceptive, and undemocratic attacks on our Constitution and elections.” And yet Toomey didn’t vote for Trump’s conviction. Instead, Toomey wrote back only to say that Trump’s behavior “might have been inappropriate.” The reader was outraged! When her grandson says “poopy,” Grandma cries out, “That’s inappropriate!”

And since Trump is obviously far worse than inappropriately poopy — Democrats can be very one-syllable about that — this woman thinks Toomey should have run Trump right out of office.

Like so many Democrats, she undoubtedly thinks Trump is an imperialist tyrant, a despotic buffoon, and a secret Russian agent as well.

Therefore Toomey should have written back, “Trump is most evil American to have ever walked the Earth! I repent my vote! Forgive me!” To this woman’s reasoning we can only agree that something is in fact seriously inappropriate here — starting with a missing sense of adult proportion. Indeed, we think such childish political reasoning is completely poopy!

Another recent letter reveals one of the main reasons why bipartisan conversation is so difficult these days. The reader stated that America under Republican presidents has been going downhill ever since Lincoln. Since the Republican Party was founded only four years before Lincoln’s election, that doesn’t look good for Republicans!

But, of course, it’s all just petulance and hyperbole to claim that such presidents as Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and Reagan devastated America. If they did, then why do we now have such great national parks, world-leading national affluence, and a world without the Soviet Union?

Indeed, why does the United States even exist if it’s all been downhill half the time for a century and a half!

Meanwhile, this ardent letter writer failed to notice that his ridiculous rhetoric could be turned on itself. “America under the Democrats has been going downhill ever since Jefferson — starting with the day he entered office! With a blatant abuse of power that openly violated the Constitution and which Jefferson himself admitted to, Jefferson bought Louisiana from Napoleon, the world’s worst dictator, to help Napoleon fund his global conquests so that he could suppress world freedom. Napoleon was the Putin of his times! Impeach Jefferson posthumously! And strike him from the history books!”

Of course that sounds hysterically infantile. So naturally we’d never say such things about Democrats, alive or dead, no matter how much we disagree with their policies, past or present. But, then, why do Democrats insist on saying such nasty asininities about Republicans? As Freud would say, perhaps has Trump exposed them — like the king without his clothes — and left their intolerant and totalitarian America hatred revealed before the public — and even themselves?

ROBERT JACQUES

JAMES STUCHELL

Williamsport

Submitted via email

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