The excellent Aug. 28 diary by poliwrangler calling for a Letter to the Editor campaign gave me a bit of inspiration. http://www.dailykos.com/...So when, soon afterward, I read a conservative LTE in my hometown daily, the Philadelphia Inquirer, complaining about an editorial cartoon that portrayed the Republican Party as serial abusers, I wrote my own LTE in response.
It was longer than was optimal, but I sent it anyway. Yesterday, less than a week later, they printed it.
They only printed the first half of it, of course. I have to remember the caveats that newspapers edit heavily and prefer letters to focus on just one central point. But, hey, they printed it. Maybe it helped that I was sort of defending the paper against the perennial accusation of "liberal bias,"--not that Tony Auth especially needs to be defended after all these years.
Here's the letter the Inquirer printed, under the heading,
"Which party caters to the elitists?"
Nearly every day we see a letter to the editor from an outraged reader complaining that your contributing commentators aren't in lockstep with the reader's right-wing worldview. One reader informed us you are "liberal elitists" for running an editorial cartoon lampooning the Republican Party. This is the same party that consistently defends corporate privilege and tax cuts for the wealthiest 2 percent of the population. Maybe that reader can explain why the GOP isn't elitist.
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Here's the rest of my letter that the paper edited out. Maybe I can use its points for a letter to another publication:
Without assuming that your more conservative letter-writers share uniform opinions on all issues, I offer rejoinders to some of their common themes.
--To the writers who scream "socialist" when President Obama proposes to regulate private sector abuses: Sometimes our government needs to restrain unbridled corporate practices. This is something that’s been supported by the public not just since Franklin Roosevelt, but since Theodore Roosevelt. Invoking the specter of Karl Marx doesn’t invalidate common-sense democratic controls.
--To Tea Partiers and others who say they "want their country back": There wasn’t a coup; your side lost a democratic election in 2008. Americans tend to look forward, not backward, and you’ll probably lose again in 2012. Will the Obama-bashers run on repealing health care reform? Rolling back environmental protections? Restricting rights for gays, immigrants, women of childbearing age? Some current G.O.P. candidates want to abolish Social Security, unemployment compensation, and citizenship guarantees under the 14th Amendment. Those don’t sound like winning electoral issues to me.
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And here's the Tony Auth editorial cartoon that started this off, eliciting the conservative letter-writer's charge of "liberal elitism:"
http://www.gocomics.com/...