In the past few weeks, you have published a number of letters where the authors make erroneous claims or have referred to incomplete information. These have come from both conservative and progressive writers.
However, the letter you published last week where the writer wrote that "Sarah, Glenn, Rush and others put their own lives at risk on the front lines as martyrs" is absurd. More probably, the three mentioned people put their interest in dollars ahead of most everything else. Most of the current conservative media players have found ways to make a lot of money. Most are multi-millionaires, thanks to their ability to play their audiences well.
I must applaud these people for the way they do this. By working with a few very rich conservatives who buy books and offer them free or for low-price distribution through places like the Conservative Book Club, books by this group appear to be best sellers. (In all honesty, this practice is not limited to conservative authors.)
To ramp up the faithful, statements such as the half truth about Shirley Sherrod are made. Then when a rapid - and wrong - response is made, the faithful are told that the administration acts too quickly. But when the administration thinks before it acts, the faithful are told that the administration does not act fast enough.
We have been told by one of your frequent writers that she does not look at Web sites but gets all her information from unbiased sources such as Fox News. Why is it that I get a balanced view by listening to programs that feature people on both sides of an issue and read material posted on the web by many people? Yet if I mention that I think BBC America, PBS News Hour and NPR News are fairly free of bias and present both sides of an issue, the faithful will scream that I use the "biased liberal press" as a basis for my information and that is why I should listen to Fox News?
Perhaps I should invoke some tenants of Christianity since this is one of the themes the faithful use to "prove" that others are not following the right path and are politically wrong. I have read too many convoluted religious arguments intertwined with politics. Sarah Palin is good at doing this as well as bringing in mothers and children when she really has a poor argument - the Mother, God and apple pie approach. (Now, Sarah has also compared her language to that of Shakespeare which implies her greatness intellectually.)
Perhaps you might ask some of the local pundits to write an extended article now and then for use on the editorial/opinion page. This might allow some who seem incoherent to become coherent. Or perhaps you could institute a policy like many newspapers do of allowing no more than one submission every two or so weeks. This might make some people think before they submit a letter.
