It was wholly a pleasure to get your correspondence, Dear Reader. Or, actually, the correspondence you forwarded to us. It was written by a third party, but you wanted us to run it on the editorial page. You offered to pay. (Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, we don't handle advertising. They don't allow us to play with money.)
We read with curiosity the . . . thing . . . that you forwarded. And you wanted our opinion of it. Of all the things that thrills us to the marrow, having a reader ask our opinion is right there at the top. Opinion is our thing! We love giving it. Ask us about sugar in cornbread. Or the refs during the Auburn game.
But since you asked . . . .
Where to start? How about at the beginning?
One day we're going to have to write a column about the differences between the Nazis and the Marxists. How something can be both is beyond us. Besides inflicting their ideology on others at the point of a gun, what did they have in common?
How a policy can be SS/Marxist is confusing. It would be red/blue. Cold/hot. Mars/Venus. But, as your writer put it, the vaccine passports that may or may not be implemented are "SS/Marxist." That would have surprised both groups.
The email you forwarded opined that only the vaccinated died during the Spanish Flu in 1918. That would be a neat trick. A vaccine for the flu didn't even come around until the 1930s. Sure, vaccines were about. But not vaccines for the flu. And such vaccines--for the flu--didn't come into widespread use until after World War II. So the major claim of the piece seems to be, well, false. That would stop any editor in his/her tracks.
National Guard troops are NATO mercenaries? Goodness. Your writer friend really needs to switch to decaf. Some of us were in the National Guard here in Arkansas, and never once did a first sergeant give a class on mercenarying for NATO.
Once, on a ReForGer (Return of Forces to Germany) mission in Europe, we saw some NATO types, wearing strange insignia and funny-looking camo, but they never once gave an order to an American soldier.
Even those in the medical field aren't safe from libel. The submitted piece calls them Covid Storm Troopers. We kept looking for a link to The Onion on this column, but it appears as though the writer is serious. Dead serious. Even the term "health care" is put in scare quotes throughout the piece. Is health care now disputed?
For some reason your writer brought Australia into this. Why, is anybody's guess. Australia has always been a good egg, at least since it stopped being a penal colony. ("We'll save Australia. Don't wanna hurt no kangaroo."--Randy Newman)
But apparently Australia and its "health care" policies mean it is no better off than Stalin's Russia, Hitler's Germany or Mao's China.
Now that's an opinion! We wish the writer had gone down that path and explained his reasoning. Because we would have loved to have read it. Thesis: How a liberal, and leading, democracy in the modern world can be compared to totalitarian regimes in the past that killed millions of people. That would be an interesting read. In abnormal psychology classes.
But the main reason we can't run the column, besides all of its inaccuracies and insults, is this: We might find ourselves in court. The things said about Dr. Anthony Fauci and Bill Gates (Bill Gates?) are, well, in poor form.
And some things are just unbelievable. As in, they are impossible to believe.
All congressmen and their staffs are exempt from the covid vaccine? Strange, but many of those elected officials sat for photos when they got their shots.
Others exempted from the vaccine include "6,000 White House employees"? Who knew there were so many? Certainly not White House employees. The whole of the Executive Office of the president of the United States--not just White House staff but also including the NSC, the Office of Management and Budget, and other executive agencies with their own offices--numbers less than 2,000.
Also exempted, according to the article: 2,500 Pfizer employees, 1,500 Moderna employees, and 120,000 Johnson & Johnson employees. How did J&J get so many more exemptions? The competition should be furious.
With your permission, we're going to have to pass on this one. Or even without your permission. There are just too many provable falsehoods.
At one point in the submitted piece, the writer says the elites are after our liberties, our Constitution, our families, our way of life and our "very humanity." We would disagree with that completely. But we would probably publish it. Because we run letters to the editor saying similar things all the time. That's opinion, and people disagree on opinions. For proof, see the letters section on the opposite page every day. We print a lot of opinions that we disagree with.
Just not these kinds of demonstrably false diatribes. We hope you understand. Thanks for the submission. But even more so, thank you for reading.
--eds