Posted on 11/20/2003 11:03:26 AM PST by doug from upland
Link to letters: CLICK FOR LETTERS.
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Today's GUARDIAN in England has letters to the editor. Some will make you want to scream. Some will make you want to throw a brick through a window. Some will make you want to slap a useful idiot upside the head. This one, however, will make you feel good.
Dear Mr President,
Today you arrive in my country for the first state visit by an American president for many decades, and I bid you welcome.
You will find yourself assailed on every hand by some pretty pretentious characters collectively known as the British left. They traditionally believe they have a monopoly on morality and that your recent actions preclude you from the club. You opposed and destroyed the world's most blood-encrusted dictator. This is quite unforgivable.
I beg you to take no notice. The British left intermittently erupts like a pustule upon the buttock of a rather good country. Seventy years ago it opposed mobilisation against Adolf Hitler and worshipped the other genocide, Josef Stalin.
It has marched for Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Khrushchev, Brezhnev and Andropov. It has slobbered over Ceausescu and Mugabe. It has demonstrated against everything and everyone American for a century. Broadly speaking, it hates your country first, mine second.
Eleven years ago something dreadful happened. Maggie was ousted, Ronald retired, the Berlin wall fell and Gorby abolished communism. All the left's idols fell and its demons retired. For a decade there was nothing really to hate. But thank the Lord for his limitless mercy. Now they can applaud Saddam, Bin Laden, Kim Jong-Il... and hate a God-fearing Texan. So hallelujah and have a good time.
Frederick Forsyth
Novelist
Dear President Bush,
You will be greeted by vast numbers of protesters who think the invasion of Iraq was a crime, and by others who think it was not so much a crime as a mistake - badly planned, and initiated with no idea of what the US was getting into. I wish more of the protesters were there to remind you of your atrocious record as governor of Texas, when you upheld death sentences passed by corrupt and biased courts on illiterate, incompetent and all-toofrequently innocent defendants. Many of the protesters think you are a mass murderer; you certainly have form as a serial killer.
Alan Ryan
Warden of New College, Oxford
Sir:
In your letter in the GUARDIAN directed toward my president, you said:
" I wish more of the protesters were there to remind you of your atrocious record as governor of Texas, when you upheld death sentences passed by corrupt and biased courts on illiterate, incompetent and all-toofrequently innocent defendants. Many of the protesters think you are a mass murderer; you certainly have form as a serial killer."
Apparently, you have information that we do not. Will you please provide the names of the all-too frequently innocent defendants whom Governor Bush had put to death? If you cannot provide the names, will you have the decency to issue an apology? If you won't do that, will you at least have the sense to destroy your computer and keyboard so you can no longer compose such garbage for others to read?
I am waiting. Please surprise me.
Dear Mr (redacted),
As you no doubt know, one of the interesting features of the Texan criminal justice system is the unwillingness of the attorney general's office to reopen cases where there is a real question of the guilt of the accused and subsequently executed. Since the state of Illinois is almost certainly more rather than less scrupulous in its treatment of defendants, and it racked up something like a ten percent mis-conviction rate upon investigation, I tend to assume that some 15 of the people executed during Bush's governorship were innocent of the crime for which they were executed.
This is, of course, only indirect evidence, but I would be more willing to agree that I was wrong if the state was eager to investigate every single case where a plausible doubt had been raised. I ought, perhaps, to add that I do not in the least wish to say that the people executed were useful citizens, redeemable, or innocent of absolutely everything they were charged with - only that they were often executed when their guilt in the particular matter was in doubt, when extenuating circumstances were not taken into account, when all those things that someone less morally obtuse than your president would have at least thought about, were taken into account.
And may I congratulate you on the measured and temperate way in which you respond to criticism?
best wishes
Alan Ryan
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Alan Ryan
New College, Oxford
Tel: 01865-279501
PA: 01865-279515
Fax: 01865-724047
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MY RESPONSE BACK TO HIM ---
I appreciate your quick response! I am disappointed, however, that you didn't have the names to support the assertion. As a supporter of the death penalty, I would be very angry if innocent people in Texas were put to death by a man I admire.
Intellectual honesty and moral clarity, it seems to me, would require that a reference as "serial killer" necessitates at least some proof rather than "I tend to assume." Assuming doesn't quite make the case as "serial killer."
In Bill Clinton's visits to England, I never read any letters to the editor about the death penalty relative to Ricky Ray Rector. Did you ever write such a letter? From a Google search:
RICKY RAY RECTOR
Executed by State of Arkansas on January 24, 1992
Ricky Ray Rector was retarded due to lobotomy. His IQ is unknown, but his retardation must have been profound, as before being executed, he saved his last dessert "for after". Governor Bill Clinton, who was running for Presidency, did fly back to Arkansas to be sure his execution would be carried out.
I have enjoyed our exchange. By the way, perhaps you would do me a favor.
I am doing research on the reason for Bill Clinton's departure from Oxford those many years ago. According to a writer who spoke with a former State Department employee, Clinton was asked to leave Oxford and the country because of an alleged sexual assualt on a young woman he met in a pub named Eileen Wellstone. Apparently, Wellstone's parents did not press for criminal charges and a Rhodes Scholar was simply sent home. I am not going to assume guilt here, and I would like the real story. Are you able to shed light on it?
Thank you for your help. Here is to a safer world, even if we disagree how we arrive there.
Mark Steyn: It's 'peace' psychosis in a nut's hell
In this paper before the war, Mr Pinter assured us that millions of Iraqi children's rectums were chronically leaking blood - something to do with depleted uranium from the Yanks. In every medical facility I visited in western and northern Iraq, I inquired about this phenomenon and found no one who knew of a single sufferer.
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