Letter to the Bugle

Here's a letter I sent to the Bugle, a weekly freebie paper. They printed a letter last week with the usual "support our president" rhetoric. I figure we should never leave anything like that unanswered. It's the principle of the thing. This is my favorite kind of writing -- swoop in, lob a few zingers, and get out before you exceed the attention span of the audience.


Dear Editor,

I would like to respond to the letter by Thomas E. Fry that appeared in your July 21 issue.

The deal is, we have freedom of speech in this country. We are under no obligation to support the President, most particularly when he is wrong. Believe it or not, millions of Americans knew that the Iraq war was going to be a fiasco before it even started. The Iraq war is a tragedy that didn’t need to happen.

Saddam was never a threat to us; he could have been easily contained, just like we contained the Soviet Union for nearly 50 years.

We should have finished the job against Al Quaeda, but this isn’t the war the Bush regime wanted to fight. His Iraq fiasco has been a diversion from the war against Al Quaeda, and we will surely pay the price for his incompetence.

Sincerely yours,

Gordon Solberg