Re: “The Lame Duck, the Liar and the Buffoon”, (Citizen, Feb. 1)
I must thank Robin Dutton for the letter to the editor on Feb 1, 2017. The letter is an endorsement and not a criticism of the Citizen’s editorial as the letter provides several examples of “alternative facts”.
Fact #1: Donald Trump was NOT elected by a “large majority”. Final vote tally shows U.S. voters cast 74,113,495 votes for other presidential candidates other than Trump. Trump received only 62,985,106! More than 11 million more votes for other candidates than Trump received! Trump didn’t receive a majority of popular votes over Hillary Clinton, where she received almost three million more votes than Trump.
Fact #2: A majority of the electoral college, a system borrowed from the French aristocracy to counter the wishes of the real electorate, elected Trump. A total of only 304 appointed members of the electoral college voted for Trump. But more than 74 million other voters didn’t! Hardly a majority.
Fact #3: The first Gulf War occurred under the Bush Sr. presidency. The second Gulf War occurred under the Bush Jr. presidency and if you want to talk about manipulation read the many books and articles showing the reasons for the second war were false, lies — trumped up, so to speak.
Under the Bush Jr. presidency 31,000 Afghan and more than 100,000 Iraq non-combatants (civilians) were killed. During the first few months of the “shock and awe” Bush campaign 317 civilians were being killed daily and totalled more than 6,000 in those few months since the first bombs were dropped.
VP Cheney and Secretary of State Rumsfeld, the two who provided “alternative facts” and falsely accused Iraq of having weapons of mass destruction, are the main characters responsible for much of the current chaos and destruction in some of the Arab countries.
Fact #4: Obama and Clinton are responsible for carrying on new wars and chaos in Yemen and Libya and civilian deaths in Iraq and Syria during the Daesh counter offensive.
Clinton isn’t the only secretary of state that has had to take on the role of a nation’s war ‘manager’.
The U.S. has been at war 224 years of the 240 years since its independence, and most of their secretaries of state over this period had to take on the government responsibility for war as the position mandates.
Hopefully the letter writer will take note of the words of Jonathon Swift in 1710 — “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it”, and take more care when providing ‘facts’.
Phil Le Good
Cobble Hill
