Leonard Pitts, The Miami Herald

March 25, 2009

Leonard Pitts
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, Florida 33132-1693

RE: A nation’s “hate” and how to prosper from it. A hopefully amusing take on your Jeremiad about how the biases of White Southern Democrats – as if there were any other kind - are still with us.

Mr. Pitts,

I am bound and determined not to be cliché ridden but, Jeepers, doesn’t every cloud have a silver lining? You get to write a column on how most of the country longs for the good old days of the Klan. I get to write a letter saying “Dad gum but you’re right. ‘Men are not angels’.”

At least now we know that there are only 926 ‘hate’ groups in the country. I would have bet the over on that.

For years I have been asking “Where the Hell is Cheney? What was he doing at those ‘undisclosed locations’?” Now we have the answer. He and his wife were making a fortune stitching up all those Klan robes. His mail order “Burn a Cross” kit is one job that won’t be outsourced. He wouldn’t allow 3rd Worlders to touch any of his Kleagle attire.

Speaking of “hate groups”, and God knows I hate to tell you this, but what the Hell is the Southern Poverty Law Center? I’ve spent a lot of money on stamps trying to uncover their background. Try as I did I can’t get a certified financial from them. Why is that?

Their founder, a dude named Morris Dees, would be welcome at neither a VFW convention nor the local meeting of The Federalist Society. I say founder too quickly. Who knows who founded them? Who knows where their money comes from? I know that if you keep Poverty in your title you must have deep pockets somewhere. Would it be hateful to ask them about it?

Speaking of gratuitous hating would it be beyond the pale – another cliché, this one of Irish origin - to suggest that Vice President Curley Biden and Treasury Secretary Giethner should be “struck regularly, like gongs”?

Biden is so dumb he makes my finger nails curl backwards.

It was obvious that Giethner was a weasel. What became obvious was that he was/is/shall be a Homerically incompetent weasel.

Could it be that the President, and let me say that he is the best President we have, keeps them around to make him look better?

You say that while we have a Christ-killer in the Senate, a towel headed bomb thrower in the House, and a wet back Governor in New Mexico, so what? I know what you’re thinking. Those terms are pure “hate”. If President Bambi can get a laugh out of making fun of retarded kids, and on national TV to boot, I can stretch the limits of the permissible, can’t I? After all, the best five words in the Constitution still are…Congress shall make no law…aren’t they?

You say that there is no national “goal line which, once crossed, will allow the nation to declare itself cured, and once cured, we’ll never have to grapple with hatred again. But it doesn’t work that way.”

Imagine the “goal line” is like the horizon. Let’s give it a name. Let’s call it Utopia. [Utopia means, literally, nowhere.]

No matter how fast you run you will never get to the goal line, let alone cross it.

You will never get to Nowhere.

And, if you did, how would you know where you were?

But hark back to the Silver Lining.

You get to write a column speaking about the empty portion of the glass.

I get to write a letter asking why we never see anybody “swimming to Cuba”.