Reading the March 9 opinion pages, I ran across a commentary by Bass Trumbo that struck me as very entertaining but seemed to be based on Mr. Trumbo’s fantasies and imagination. It started out with “I find myself wondering,” progressed to “does (this),” “I assume,” “Do they really believe,” “Maybe,” and “What about.” Really a lot of pure speculation.
Somehow Trumbo has deduced that the Tea Party movement is a bunch of Daniel Boone, wild-west characters who want to live in the past.
The attack is not surprising. The Tea Party delivered the Dems a heavy blow in 2010, and with the outrage over the Affordable Care Act, they are in real danger of losing the Senate this year. Look for an unprecedented deluge of smear tactics in the coming months. Truth is no longer a requirement, apparently, in politics (If you like your health insurance and your doctor, you can keep them).
In the last presidential election, the Leader of our U.S. Senate, Harry Reid, stood on the Senate floor and proclaimed Mitt Romney didn’t pay any income taxes, then recently he said all the horror stories of people who had been hurt by the Affordable Care Act were lies, that none of them were true. I was reminded of those statements when I read Trumbo’s commentary. Really, we can all do better than that.
Trumbo also referred to the Tea Party as “sick and mean spirited.” That’s what you do when you can’t argue your point with facts: You regress to name-calling.