Editor, Times-Union: I have never read such utter hogwash as the editorial put forth by Rich Lowry in Thursday’s edition of the Times-Union. There is no definition of what it really means to be “patriotic” beyond the quotations of a couple of disparate visionaries and no distinction made between loving one’s country of origin and loving the bad decisions made by the current or past governing administrations. What it implies is that if you are willing to question the positions and actions take by our elected officials in geo-political affairs then you must be unpatriotic. This was the same tenet put forth by the Bush administration toward any who would dare question the wisdom of the invasion of Iraq on the premise of the existence of WMDs. It’s the reason the sweeping executive powers and legal privacy invasion granted by law in the passing the Patriot Act were called, wait for it, The Patriot Act. I might remind you that the German people also had unbridled “Emotion of National Pride,” leading right up to the invasion of Poland in 1939 marking the beginning of World War II. Too often the word “patriot” has been misused to reinforce radical ideologies. It is used all over the world to jail political dissidents, when in fact our nation was founded by political dissidents. Although it is widely held that Thomas Jefferson never said, “Dissent is the highest form of patriotism,” I believe it is a principle our democracy is founded upon. Poll results are not empirical evidence, in fact most are presented with an extremely wide margin of error and depending on how questions were asked and the demographics polled, they can be completely inaccurate. Rhetoric like this is counter-productive and inflammatory, and the voting populace is steadily growing weary of being pitted against each other over vague sentiment. Why don’t we just examine what it would take to implement competent and efficient governance without all the extremism? Beyond all that, Guliani’s comments were just another desperate attempt at retaining significance on the national political stage and an appeasement to the radical conservative fringe of the Republican party. Ted Carter Leesburg, via email
