Amy Sherman The Miami Herald

September 6, 2010

Amy Sherman
The Miami Herald
One Herald Plaza
Miami, FL 33132-1693

RE: “Sticks and stones may break my bones…” – Is there a benefit to being thin skinned in a time when people line up to say that they want to kill us? Some comments of your Historical naïveté as shown in your article in the Miami Herald this morning.

Ms. Sherman,

Historians have said that the battle of Shiloh was like a “fist fight with guns”. The hero of Shiloh, the man who changed the Civil War, the man who ended the Civil War 18 months quicker than anyone thought was possible, was named Sherman. Any chance you are related to him?
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Would you be so kind as to pass this along to Congressman Klein?

I say “pass it along” because even though I am a constituent of his he has stopped responding to my letters.

I trust you will see that my letter is clear and that it pays proper respect to grammar, style, and syntax.

You quote Congressman Klein thus:

“Some in Congress talk about taking money out of Social Security
and paying down the deficit or the war in Afghanistan,” said Klein.

I find it astonishing that Congressman Klein does not know that the Federal government has been doing that since 1964.

Each and every dollar taken from American employees and American employers since 1964 has gone directly into the general account of the United States government. Once a year the Treasury figures out how much it has taken and issues a chit, a marker, an IOU to the trustees of the Social Security system. The note says that it is payable on demand. It then goes into the legendary “lock box”. That’s the one that is stored safely on Mars. Some years it is sent to Uranus. Far up Uranus.

If the Miami Herald has a pension plan ask the Human Resources director what would happen if your employer did that?



I can tell you that the people who run the Herald would be frog marched out of the building in shackles.

By saying that “some in Congress want to take money out of Social Security” when Congress has been doing that for 46 years makes Congressman Klein a mountebank and a charlatan who is the political equivalent of a Bernie Madoff or a Scott Rothstein. The only other possibility is that he is a HORSE’S ASS of incalculable dimensions. Since he managed to be both a Florida legislator AND a registered lobbyist of the legislature of which he was a member I would put him in the Ponzi cheerleader class.

How about the Herald having a candidate’s night before the election? All the candidates could gather around a symbolic lock box on October 31st and say, a capella, “Anything for Halloween”. Perhaps you could have a distinguished Herald alumnus open the box. He would have to be in good shape because a bunch of clever Chinamen clutching T-Bills will come charging out yelling “Show me the money”.

As to the campaign being “more about insults than ideas” I find it astonishing that political reporters are so lacking in knowledge on the tome and tenor of political campaigns in this country.

In 218 years of national campaigns we have had exactly 2 that were absent [mostly] insults. They were when George Washington, AKA “The Father of his Country” ran.

The election of 1800 still holds the record for dirty campaigns. And to think that they did it before e-mails and twitters. In fact they did it when you needed Ben Franklin’s kite to get electricity. It is well to note that two giants of American History – Adams and Jefferson – went at each other like 2 cats in a bag.

Abraham Lincoln was routinely and regularly called a “baboon”. This may shock you but the Democratic Party and the New York Times acquiesced in this.

1876 was like afternoon TV when it cost $12 and took 45 days to get a letter from New York to San Francisco.

In 1906 Theodore Roosevelt told the German-American Mayor of Milwaukee that there was lamp post with his name on it.

1916 was the most bigoted campaign ever. If we are to believe Justice Marshall Woodrow Wilson lived up to and surpassed his hard won title as the most racist President in the 20th century.



The facts, post election, would support the conclusion that three times in the 20th century – 1916, 1940, and 1964 – the Democratic candidates for President, the winning Democratic candidates for President, lied to the American people about future involvement in foreign wars. You can look it up.

I disagree with Colonel West calling Congressman Klein, a hero of modern American Liberalism, a “momma’s boy”. In Florida there is only one candidate who deserves that title. Congressman Kendrick Meek inherited his seat from his mother. A serendipitous uptick for him and her was that he avoided the death tax by inheriting it while she was living.

Mud slinging is as American as apple pie.







Kevin Smith