Give peace a chance
I have criticized President Donald Trump before and probably will again, but in the interim I believe he deserves credit for giving peace with North Korea a chance. No other American president in recent history has met with a North Korea leader in an effort to talk rather than fight.
The super hawks of both the Republican and Democrat parties had rather fight than talk because that gives ammunition to further increase an already bloated defense budget. After all, many members of Congress reportedly get the majority of their campaign contributions from defense contractors. A recent example would be when Trump mentioned peace, defense stocks took a drastic drop. Congress knows who butters its bread.
People laugh when Trump says the nuclear threat from North Korea is gone as a result of his meeting with Kim Jong Un. In my opinion there is no chance Kim would try to reach the USA with one of his alleged 16 nuclear weapons. He knows our military has over 5,000 nukes and could immediately blow him off the face of the earth.
Even Trump says Kim is highly intelligent rather than crazy.
The president was also right when he said we should not be funding the defense of nearly every democratic country in the world. That's probably one reason we are $21 trillion in debt and unable to fund badly needed infrastructure repairs to our bridges, highways, etc. For example, we have thousands of troops in Germany even though that nation is one of the richest in Europe and maintains a modern army of its own.
Trump has some good ideas but, unfortunately, does not seem to have the ability to implement them in the proper manner. Nevertheless, give him an A for effort.
VERNON McDANIEL
Ozark
No proof was offered
Paul Krugman is an accomplished economist; thus, we would expect to benefit from his economic insights, but he almost invariably prefers to write hostilely about the president, accusing him of all manner of vice. The initial sentence of his June 9 column is, "Of course Donald Trump is corrupt."
Now that claim is somewhat reminiscent of a geometry book's authoritative style: First state a theorem, then prove it. An important difference between a geometric theorem and Krugman's is that the rest of the column does not offer any proof or even example of the president's own "corruption." An equivalent geometrical proof would be to prove that the angles of a plane triangle sum to 180 degrees by discussing only squares and circles, etc. Krugman similarly refers only to the crimes of other people: even a Cabinet member way back in the time of President Warren Harding when the Cabinet member received money for his illegal acts. Bribery admittedly does qualify as serious corruption.
On the other hand, Krugman cites how some members of Trump's administration exceeded the normal constraints on government officials by overspending on their budgets with expensive travel, purchasing expensive office appurtenances, and in having their subordinates perform personal services for their bosses. We note that, however unscrupulous these actions may be, none involves transfer of money or ownership of goods to the dissolute officials, let alone to Trump.
Krugman apparently wishes to leave us with the unjustified inference that Trump not only creates the climate for, but is responsible for and personally condones any and all misfeasance by members of his administration. We are led to believe this, even though Trump did fire his secretary of Health and Human Services. Perhaps the missteps of the others were not sufficiently serious to warrant dismissal.
WILLIAM H. FRIEDMAN
Conway
More apt verse to cite
If Bible verses are going to be used to explain the child abuse going on at our border, as a Christian I think a more apt verse is "Jesus wept."
PAT BLACKSTONE
North Little Rock
Sessions and Romans
Many evangelicals and fundamentalists think our laws are derived from the Bible. Actually, the laws part is mostly Old Testament and the commentaries of Jesus on the subject make it apparent that would not agree with Justice Antonin Scalia's "the rule of law is the law of rules." In Matthew he told his followers that they could not enter the kingdom of heaven "unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees." Jesus called for justice, a word derived from the Latin for law.
The attorney general justified separating children from their parents by citing Romans 13. Now, laying aside biblical scholarly concerns on the authenticity and correctness of this letter by Paul, the fact is that it is addressed to the Romans.
Roman law started out for the tribe, but as Rome grew from republic to empire, Roman law was transformed and developed. Primitive tribal rules, turned into the foundation of modern jurisprudence, were enacted by most European countries and absorbed indirectly into the common law of England.
This transformation was work of the jurists, a specialized legal bureaucracy. Guiding them was the belief not just in rules but in the outcome, justice and "extreme justice is extreme injustice." Law came to be grounded in natural law. And as the Laws of Cicero put it, "man is born for justice, and that law and equity are not a mere establishment of opinion, but an institute of nature." So when Paul told Romans to obey the law, he trusted their law to do justice.
So where does that leave 2,000 children? In 1939 the German steamer St. Louis was not permitted to land its cargo of largely Jewish children. The American Legion and the Daughters of the American Revolution rejoiced. What was done to the Jews in Germany was done by law. What is being done to children here is that both Sessions and Sarah Sanders used the Bible against what Jesus stood for and what Paul meant.
MICHAEL B. DOUGAN
Jonesboro
Children are innocent
I try not to worry about things I can't do anything about, but I can't stop worrying about the situation at the border where children are separated from their parents. I can pray about it, which I do daily; I can vote to get rid of the monsters who created this unbelievable situation. But unfortunately, that doesn't help today!
It is impossible for me to understand the justification for this cruel and inhuman treatment. And to think that they are building tent cities to handle the overcrowding. In Texas. In the summer. In 100-degree heat and impossible humidity and no air conditioning.
As our pastor reminded us again last Sunday, we are to love everyone. I have really worked hard on that this week, but there is no love for the people who are imprisoning innocent children.
SARAH BRESHEARS
Sherwood
Talk about priorities
Seems like the Trumpster is more concerned about the players taking a knee during the anthem than he is about the children being slaughtered in our schools with guns.
BOB MASSERY
Little Rock
Editorial on 06/21/2018