Right Wing Wrong
To the Editor:
The July 30, 2021 Record had an array of right wing statements that should cause concern for most Americans. For example, on the one hand, County Judge Joe Weber is to be complimented for at least impliedly encouraging the people of Fayette County to immediately consult their family physicians on the need to take the vaccine to protect themselves and others from the far more contagious and deadly Delta mutation of the coronavirus. On the other hand, he gave with one hand and took away with the other when he speciously suggested that the coronavirus only “trickles down here” and when his County Emergency Director, Craig Moreau, reports to the County Commissioners at the same meeting on July 28 that the county has seen cases go from six to “2 to 3 times that amount.” Given that since late June when active cases in Fayette County hovered around six and that, on the very date that he made his July 28 report, there were 80 active cases in Fayette County according to KXAN (which Mr. Moreau has said uses the same sources as he does) and which now numbers at 116 which is only one less case than far more populous Washington County, was Mr. Moreau cherry picking his numbers and time spans to again make it appear that the coronavirus only “trickles down here”?
In reply to Ms. Hooper’s letter, does she realize that in Benjamin Franklin she was quoting a man of science and a patriot and so, unlike Ms. Hooper, he would not view the need to vaccinate to prevent even greater numbers of the dead added to the more than 600,000 American lives lost during this accelerating pandemic now reaching all ages as “giving up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety?” Another Founding Father, George Washington, and his fellow patriots at Valley Forge not only suffered through a harsh winter but also even more extreme suffering through a crude means of small pox vaccination ordered by Washington to protect themselves against the immune British that was vital to winning our War for Freedom and Independence to protect what you quoted Benjamin Franklin as calling “essential liberty.” Given the right wing’s belief that China deliberately “exported” the coronavirus to our country, why does the right wing who profess to be patriots choose to accommodate that conspiracy by failing to vaccinate?
As to Ms. Tietjen’s letter, does she share the same sadness for the families of the people of Fayette County who died and are dying from Covid-19 or for the father of my home town of Fayetteville in tears because his adult son is on a respirator to stay alive as she politically expressed for the “Five border agents now in the hospital with COVID?” As a person who tries to be the Christian called for by Our Lord in Matthew 25:31-46, it is my moral Christian duty out of respect for the life of others and the common good to vaccinate.
As to County Republican Chair Frank’s letter, does she realize that the main reason Texas Democratic lawmakers fled the State was to prevent Republican lawmakers from making it far more difficult for working families to vote especially in terms of the opportunities to vote even after having to jump through all of the needlessly difficult registration hurdles of the Republican bill that rest on the myth of voter fraud proven false by the repeated rulings of judges even appointed by Trump himself and by intense Red State audits of the last election?
Perhaps, to address a far more nefarious and destructive form of voter disenfranchisement, Ms. Frank can explain why finding a Republican lawmaker in Austin or in Congress to vote for a Constitutional Amendment to repeal the 5-4 GOP SCOTUS ruling in Citizens United is scarcer than hen’s teeth.
I challenge Ms. Frank to write a letter to the Record explaining why not just the Democratic Party but also her Republican Party should oppose that Citizens United ruling which is the single greatest threat to our Constitution’s representational democracy that made America the beacon of liberty throughout the world. That Republican Supreme Court Justices only ruling made corporations the equivalent of living human beings and the money of corporations, both foreign and domestic, “free political speech” to be secretly spent in unlimited amounts to deceive voters and make incumbent lawmakers cower to the self-aggrandizing demands of corporations not in the interest of working families and small business owners.
For once, right wing Republicans, especially Texans like Ms. Frank still standing silent on the sidelines, need to join the rest of America in the fight to repeal that infamous GOP Justice ruling and to restore “We, the People” to our sacred Constitution as envisioned by our Founding Fathers instead of “We, the Corporations.”
John W. Mikus
Fayetteville