Replies

***Here's a letter that can be copied and pasted and sent directly to the newspapers and periodicals in your area!***
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August 22, 2003

To whom it may concern:

I am writing to warn you that there is a coordinated attempt to have Democratic Party talking points published in a number of the nations’ newspapers and magazines this week. While every citizen has a right to their own opinion, merely copying and pasting talking points is a waste of everybody’s time and detracts from the goal of the Letters to the Editor section: to express PERSONAL, INDIVIDUAL opinions.

Please be on the lookout for any Letters to the Editor that contain the following talking points. If published, they will hardly be unique and will be mere duplicates of letters in many other newspapers. Here are the talking points that are being circulated by NotGeniuses.com. It is also worthwhile to note that, as documented by the Washington Post in this article (http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename=article&node=&contentId=A47852-2003Jul25&notFound=true), people who send such Letters to the Editor have a history of acting violently towards and abusing journalists and editors. Thank you for your time.
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· George Bush has presided over the first job-losing presidency since Herbert Hoover. During his tenure, we have lost more than 3 million jobs. However, George Bush clearly doesn't see this as much of a problem because, when given the opportunity to create about 75 new jobs, he outsourced them to India.
· The projected deficit for this year is upwards of $455 billion (source: OMB). Remember the surpluses we had under Clinton? The Cato Institute, hardly a liberal outfit, calls George Bush "the mother of all big spenders". In fact, George W. Bush's father said that "there is no practice more dangerous than that of borrowing money". Why hasn't his son listened?
· The unemployment rate has passed 6%, with 8.8 million Americans out of work. To compare, under Bush, the economy has lost an average of 69,000 jobs a month. Under Clinton, the economy gained an average of 239,000 jobs per month. Which record do you prefer?
· The Fed has begun wondering about deflation, something not spoken of since the Great Depression.
· Bush has done nothing to help the situation. His tax cuts have so bankrupted the Government that long term interest rates went up 1% since June, a shift to be expected when record deficits are being run, but one that is unwanted in a recovery.
· Further, his Tax Cuts, which have been packaged as stimulative, do nothing to help the economy in the short term. They are set to kick in primarily in the future, and they target the wealthy and those with stocks, the classes of people least likely to quickly spend the money.
· The States are running record deficits. In normal times, the Federal Government would aid them, but this time, only an emergency $20 billion (to be distributed among all 50) was included in the budget, and only because the Democrats insisted on it.

BTTT.

This pro-Bush editorial from the Seattle Times where Bush is visiting is also great fodder for any letters you send:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/968764/posts

Editorial
The focused presidency

President Bush will get an earful from protesters today. Aggravated Americans are a native species here, part of the culture and entitled to their protests. But this is an industrious state, and most Washingtonians will be going about their business without obsessing about the president of the United States.

This page supported the election of George W. Bush, and though we have disagreed with some of his environmental measures and the clash between homeland security and civil rights, we stand by the man.

We reckoned that Bush understood better than his opponent the incentives and protections that make the economy work. We still think so. His cuts in income taxes look risky now but will pay later by increasing investment and keeping a lid on federal spending. His work to eliminate the federal estate tax, a matter of importance to this newspaper, will help thousands of family enterprises. His attack on the double taxation of dividends aims for an improvement in both efficiency and fairness.

None of these is a quick fix. This is not a quick-fix president. He understands that the economy is not run by him, but by what millions of Americans do. He can push for a change in the background conditions, such as tax rates. He can make specific interventions such as settling the no-win antitrust case brought by the Clinton administration against Microsoft. Bush's administration has been wrong on a few things, such as changing the rules for media cross-ownership, but most of its actions have been sound.

When this page endorsed Bush, it was in spite of his lack of experience in foreign affairs. Bush learned on the job — and fast. He paid his respects to the United Nations, but he did not hang American security on a U.N. vote. The president presides over a democracy in a very different world, and a different America, than the contentious moment of his election. We believe that, overall, he has acted responsibly and well when it comes to the overriding issue of our times — our country's security. We need a strong leader in a world threatened by insane terrorism. He has been that.

This page expected that Bush would fumigate the White House of its odor of licentiousness, pardon-selling and general juvenilia. He did, which is why nobody talks about those things any longer. He has surrounded himself with adults.

Finally, he is focused. All presidents know that they have eight years at most, maybe four. Some waste that time on tricks to get their poll numbers up, or a dozen other things that seem important at the time, but aren't. Bush is making his time count.