Letter: It’s time to wake up and replace the party of fear

09/19/2006

From: The Bemidji Pioneer - 09/19/2006

The party of fear has had their run. It’s time to regain our senses and our nation. Lying to a nation, torturing prisoners, using fabricated evidence, espousing propaganda to further fabricate and support pretenses of war … are we describing a Third World dictator? On the contrary, this describes our democratically elected president who has taken the reputation of the United States of America to a new low.

Let the ends justify the means … what do I mean? We uphold the belief in high principles of democracy but our president put aside that, and like a dictator, circumvented an elected Congress to implement his own covert operations that ran contrary to our Constitution and our freedoms. To what purpose are the soldiers of our country dying if our president usurps the very liberties they are defending?

On the homefront, our president squelches scientific investigation to aid those who suffer and die from cancer, Parkinson’s and countless other degenerative diseases as the very embryos being upheld as cherished life are discarded and incinerated. Education at all levels suffers with the No Child Left Behind legislation eroding our public school education by increasing the unfunded mandates and instituting layers of testing. College tuition has far outpaced the inflation rate. On energy, we have had a president whose past has been Big Oil and during his tenure actually offered tax incentives for citizens to buy the largest SUVs!

Perhaps greatest of all affronts to what our country truly stands for is how this administration stood by and allowed the suffering of its own people to continue for so long in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. To this day, this party of fear has not lived up to its word in the Gulf states. We have rebuilt, multiple times, hospitals and power plants in Iraq, as the city of New Orleans stagnated.

I would like to believe that our country can once again be upheld as a bastion of freedom; as a country that lives up to the word of its highest leaders; as a country that honors its Constitution; as a country that leads the planet in science; and as a country that will care for its poor, its young and its senior citizens with affordable health care, affordable college education and security for its seniors.

Our USA can be so much more…

Dan R. Rogers
Guthrie