A "One-Two" Punch On Mikey

A bunch of letters appeared in the Bucks County Courier Times today supporting Patrick Murphy, which has definitely made my day thus far. I probably won't be able to get to all of them, but this one truly stood out.

Mike Fitzpatrick touts his independence from the Bush administration and the Republican congressional leadership when, in reality, many of his votes breaking with Bush or the Republican leadership were cast when his vote didn’t matter, i.e., the bill was a lost cause or the Republican margin for passage was large enough that his vote wasn’t needed.

Fitzpatrick simply has not been proactive in doing anything about the abuses of the Bush administration or the Republican leadership. Since 2000, corporate taxes have dropped by a third. Despite a corporate tax rate of 35 percent, it’s reported that nearly 95 percent of corporations pay less than 5 percent of their income in taxes, as reported by the Los Angeles Times on April 11, 2004.

The highest income brackets received the greatest personal income tax reduction under the Bush tax bills, placing more of the tax burden on the middle class and increasing the federal deficit to an unprecedented level. Fitzpatrick has supported this tax plan and, to my knowledge, has not called for any congressional investigations of pork-barrel abuses.

Let’s also look at the response to Hurricane Katrina. According to an Aug. 24th article on msnbc.com, 70 percent of the federal contracts were awarded without competitive bids. A report on National Public Radio broadcast on Aug. 29th stated that rents in the Biloxi area have doubled precluding middle and lower income residents from returning. And while the casinos and other businesses have gotten millions in aid, the funds earmarked for public housing and other housing projects for middle-income families have been tied up and not even distributed, NPR reported. Other abuses of wasteful spending have been well-documented and reported by the media.

Fitzpatrick and other Republicans have not called for any special investigations of this enormous waste. In fact, on two occasions, Fitzpatrick actually voted against efforts to investigate firms accused of abuse, fraud, or excessive profiteering in regard to Iraq and Katrina contracts (House Roll Call Vote 584, Nov. 9, 2005. House Roll Call Vote 40, March 15, 2006). This is a dereliction of duty.

Fitzpatrick’s continued support of the Bush economic policies and the wasteful spending of hard-earned low and middle-income tax revenues do not entitle him to re-election. Patrick Murphy will support accountability for congressional leadership and much-needed tax relief for middle-income taxpayers.

James Erb
Upper Makefield, PA

And this Guest Opinion appeared as well.

With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 so recently behind us, I fear that, rather than honoring the memory of the nearly 3,000 innocent victims of terrorism, our leaders in Washington are instead further sacrificing the lives of soldiers and civilians in a futile effort to avoid the appearance of defeat.

With over 2, 640 soldiers killed in Iraq, including 124 Pennsylvanians, and over 330 American soldiers killed in Afghanistan, America has now lost more soldiers than people killed on September 11th. Additionally, nearly 20,000 American soldiers have been injured in Iraq. Largely unnoticed or unmentioned are the more than 130 American civilians and 41,000 Iraqi civilians confirmed dead as a result of our military intervention in Iraq. Some estimates place the number of Iraqi civilians killed at over 100,000.

Despite the Bush administration’s predictions, few greeted us as liberators. And, perhaps due to the insufficient number of troops, the war in Iraq has not been nearly as quick as predicted. Not only have we paid a very heavy price in terms of casualties, the war has cost the American people over $312 billion (an amount that, by some estimates, could have been used to provide health insurance to over 186 million children for one year).

Despite the heroic actions and enormous sacrifices of our soldiers and civilians, as well as the high cost of these wars, Osama bin Laden remains free. Perhaps because, compared to the war in Iraq, we have spent relatively little in Afghanistan; only $89 billion.

Now that the alleged weapons of mass destruction have failed to materialize after exhaustive inspections, and any connection to 9/11 has been refuted by the 9/11 commission, the Bush administration has justified our continued sacrifice in Iraq as an effort to deliver democracy to a former dictatorship. I agree that this is a noble goal; however, the United States is not trusted in the Middle East. No matter how unjustified that view is, our leaders should have realized it and understood that our gift of Democracy would be viewed with suspicion, like the proverbial gift horse.

Furthermore, even assuming we were trusted, no one can deliver democracy to a country either unwilling or unable to accept it. Democracy is something that has to be yearned for, fought for and earned. As a result, we have left Iraq less stable than it was before we intervened. Granted, a murderous dictator has been unseated, which bodes well for the future of the Iraqi people and the world in general, but absent the trust of the Iraqi people we are unable to provide them with an effective alternative.

For all our country’s good intentions our troops, and the corporations we have placed in Iraq to rebuild it, are not trusted. The result is now we are a destabilizing factor in a country in danger of full-scale civil war.

Because our mere presence in Iraq is an instigator for insurgents, I believe the best way to avoid a civil war is to have a carefully planned withdrawal. Our soldiers have performed admirably, removing a despot and overseeing a democratic election.

This is one of the many reasons I support Patrick Murphy, the Democratic candidate for Congress. He has a viable plan; set a timeline for withdrawal of our troops with benchmarks, so that the Iraqis can step up and stand on their own to bring stability to Iraq. I believe this plan would avoid further chaos and killing in Iraq. I trust that Patrick Murphy, who spent seven months in Iraq as a soldier, knows what will work for that country better than Michael Fitzpatrick, a first-term congressman with no military service (like so many in this administration) who spent a day touring a military base in Iraq.

Let us rededicate our resources to finding Osama bin Laden, the real culprit behind 9/11 and many other atrocities, as well as to securing our country against another attack like 9/11. While we are at it we should also explore alternate energy sources so that we will not be beholden to those in the Middle East, many of whom either do not like us or do not trust us. After all, we are Americans. We have the ingenuity and the capability.

The author, Mark E. Hopkins, is a lower Southampton, PA supervisor.

I’m going to be honest; I think Hopkins is recycling some Democratic Party talking points a bit here, though he is fundamentally and overwhelmingly correct in his assessment. I think the Kerry-esque notion of Iraqis “standing up” could happen, but probably not in a context we’d prefer (with Iran as the benefactor of whatever Shia ruling institution takes over the vast majority of the country). Also, I think saying we’ll “redeploy” and “bring our people home” in the same breath is a bit disingenuous; some will come home, sure, as they should, but border redeployment will require something along the lines of our mediation in Kosovo, and the last I checked, we still had people in that area of the world (without that redeployment, we could be looking at a true regional war, and the $100-a-barrel-for-oil scenario of Trudy Rubin could become the hideous reality, to say nothing of the human cost which is more important).

Please understand, though, that this is nit-picking with a plan that both Patrick and John Kerry are putting forward that is a hell of a lot better than what we would face with Fitzpatrick returning to Congress continuing to parrot the Repug party line (for example, he STILL hasn’t criticized Rumsfeld for his recent remarks calling those who oppose the war “appeasers” suffering from “moral and intellectual confusion” – if he were reporting to a president who actually had a backbone, Dem or Repug, he would have been canned long ago).

As I said, though, Mark Hopkins and James Erb are absolutely right in their assessments (and as always, to help elect Patrick and put him to work for us, click here).

Update 9/20: And to see what kind of a job Dubya and his buddies have done after our troops have sacrificed so much, check this out from Brandoland (it's not pretty).