Reply to Don Cole of Albany's Northwest-News

Last week Don Cole's "Right Way" column was headlined "Democrats take hate to new, ugly level." He says "Democrats have raised the strategy of hate to a new level, but hate will not win in political campaigns or in any endeavor in life." Here's a quick question for you Don: which political party was it that sent out memos to its candidates in the early 1990's advising them to call their opponents "sick, pathetic, liberal, incompetent, tax-spending traitors?" Hint: their Presidential candidate this year is the one whose convention delegates wore Purple Heart Band-Aids to mock war wounds his opponent had received. And Don, which Party is the one that advised its candidates to use the following to describe their opponents: "decay, sick, unionized bureaucracy, greed, corruption, radical, permissive, bizarre?" Hint: their Presidential candidate is the one who had "push" telephone polls in the South Carolina primary in 2000 asking if voters would vote for his opponent, Senator John McCain, if they knew that he had a black baby born out of wedlock. (The truth was that McCain and his wife had adopted an orphan from Bangladesh, but the voters being called weren't told that.)

As for your condemnation of Michael Moore and the movie Fahrenheit 9-11, if that movie were shown on television the Sunday night before the election, Bush wouldn't draw 20 percent of the vote on election day. Why? Because the star of the movie is none other than George W. Bush, uncensored and uncut. When voters see him, his family members and cronies buddying up to the Saudis who invested in his companies, when they see the Bush people trying to appease members of the Taliban who came to Texas seeking financing for an oil pipeline, they will be sick to their stomachs. And when they see him sitting on a stool in a first grade classroom in Florida with a blank look on his face for five minutes after he has been told that a second tower has been hit and America is under attack, they will wonder how on earth Bush can ever lay claim to being a responsible or competent commander in chief.

Don, if your headline had been accurate, it would have said "Republicans take hypocrisy to new, ugly level." I've got a $1,000 bet for you, loser donates to the charity of the winner's choice: you get hooked up to a polygraph and I'll ask you ten "yes or no" questions about George Bush and the Republican Party, starting with "Are $400 billion annual deficits good for America?" and ending with "If Gore had won the election, would you have approved of him going for a month long vacation on August 7, 2001, and doing absolutely nothing about terrorism the day after receiving a Presidential Daily Brief titled "Osama Bin Laden Determined to Attack within the United States?" If you can answer with the Republican party line to all 10 questions without making the needle jump, I'll donate to your charity. If you miss five or more, you donate to mine. We'll call a score of 6 to 9 a tie and we'll each donate $500.00. I await your call.