Since someone asked ...

Since someone asked ...

EDITOR:

To answer Monday’s question of what liberals want:

We want competent people in office, regardless of skin color or sex. Palin’s selection, a quarter-century after the Democrats nominated a woman for V. P., was a ruse by people who — 88 years after U. S. women won the right to vote — still don’t get it. It’s not about just putting any woman in office because of her sex — it’s about not barring any competent woman from office just because of her sex. Many eligible men and women of color, more qualified than Justice Thomas, were denied the chance to serve on the Supreme Court in favor of that ideological puppet. If you need transportation, will you pick a car with a bad transmission but a great paint job? The same rules apply when electing people to take this country where it needs to go.

We want equal access for all to such things as free public education, libraries, parks, bridges and roads, justice, and military defense. Does Monday’s writer feel that only those who can afford private armies, tutors, roads, and parks deserve them? Taxes allow for the maintaining of infrastructure and services for all. For our government “of, by, and for the people” to work, though, we are obliged to hold officials accountable for their use of our tax dollars. (Incidentally, the writer’s claim that “every socialist economy … is in decline” leaves me wondering on what basis he thinks the capitalist economies are so sunny.)

“Peace at any price?” Which party sold our birthright — the Constitution and the Bill of Rights — for some undefined goal of “vanquishing terror forever?” And more terror has come to us from the current administration than any other source: bottomless war, banking collapses, foreclosures, outsourced jobs, denial of health coverage, schools under emergency watch, terror alerts, suspension of habeas corpus — need I continue?

I’m awed by the writer’s ability to speak for the whole “Muslim world.” I wouldn’t presume to speak for one Christian sect or even one church, though I count Christian ministers and priests among my kin, living and dead. His reduction of all Islamic history and thought to one viewpoint is ridiculous.

As for Obama being an “unapologetic, brazen liberal,” for what should he apologize, given this Republican Party’s abysmal record?

Finally, a nit to pick: Mark Twain said to use the proper word to do the job, not its second cousin. “Penultimate” means “next-to-last.” I feel reasonably sure that Barack Obama will be far from the penultimate champion of liberal causes.

VIRGINIA ELSER

Youngstown

Who speaks for little people?

EDITOR:

I would like to know why neither candidate has talked about lower class people? We work for a living too.

There are more people working for less than $10 an hour in the state of Ohio. This is not considered middle class. How can you vote for either candidate when they don’t care about the little people?

If the bailout plan would have worked, the rich people would have been taken care of, not normal people.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and we are endowed by our creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” I don’t believe this even exists anymore.

NANCY PERKINS

East Liverpool