Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz

January 16, 2011

Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz

Pembroke Pines, FL

RE: Rhetoric, heated or otherwise; discourses, reasoned or otherwise; free speech or not; “slippery slopes” and/or “chilling effects”. Some comments on your essay in this morning’s Miami Herald.

Debbie, Debbie,

First, a style point.

Your CV says that you have two degrees in Political Science. That should mean that you would be familiar, if not necessarily conversant, with all things Greek: Ideas, History, literature, culture, and its lasting effect on Western Civilization.

The Trivium, the capstone of Western Man’s development and a monument to reasoned discourse, consists of three parts: Grammar, Logic, and Rhetoric. Grammar is the glue allows Rhetoric to present an argument in, forgive me, Logical order.

Your piece in this morning’s Herald contains a glaringly egregious error. You say “…for none of us are immune”. That is akin to having 6 hecates debating 6 harridans, said debate being refereed by Lillian Hellman with Bella Abzug being the time keeper, by using their finger nails on a blackboard to make their arguments.

None is a collective noun. The correct verb in this instance is “is”. Gosh! I sound positively Clintonesque, don’t I?

It is a small point, no bigger than a man’s fist against the horizon, but it is a vital part of making an argument. Was it Alice or the Red Queen who said, “Those words mean exactly what I want them to mean”.

It is possible that you did not write this. I have fond memories of you being on TV when your flack catcher, doubtless an employee on a public payroll, said that you could only take a few questions because “Debbie’s time is so precious”.

You may want to spend some of that “precious time” snuggling up to Strunk & White. If you can’t why not have some of your amanuenses do it.

You write movingly of Congresswoman Giffords because a man with snakes for brains shot her.





My last gun fight was 18 years ago.

The first police officer was dead before he hit the ground.

The second one took a .357 slug from 10 feet. It went into his right quadrant about one inch from his sternum. The hole was about the size of a quarter, a 25 cent piece.

I rendered immediate first aid for 17 minutes before the paramedics arrived.

He danced at my daughter’s wedding 2 ½ years later.

I know what damage a mad man with a gun can do.

I use that knowledge as a starting point

In your examples of the “bile and vitriol that have been tearing us apart at the seems” you use as examples the vandalizing of Congressman Grisalva’s office, Congresswoman Giffords’s windows being shot out, and Congressman Perrielo’s gas lines being cut.

I tell you that the Greeks would have told you that correlation is not causation. Further, if you know any prosecutors, ask them what kind of a case could be made with such evidence as you present.

Speaking of “slippery slopes” and “chilling effects” we are coming up to the 10th anniversary of you sending Agent Thomas and Agent Mineva of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement to my house because of something I wrote to and about you. These men had badges and guns.

Thomas Jefferson, noted oenophile and revolutionary, said that when people fear the government we have tyranny. When the government fears the people we have liberty.

Your examples of “bile and vitriol” lacked one thing. You neglected to mention that the victims were all Democrats.

Speaking of Democrats, don’t you think you should have mentioned Democratic Senator Manchin of West Virginia? In the election to fill former KuKluxKlan member Robert Byrd’s seat – He was Deputy Grand Kleagle, wasn’t he? – he shot an ad using a scoped high powered rifle to shoot a hole in the proposed Tax and Cup Bill. I was in the coal business in West Virginia. That’s how I know that the rifle was high powered.






Why didn’t you include Julianne Malveaux? She said that she hoped that Justice Thomas’s wife fed him a high fat diet so that he would have a heart attack and a stroke.

How about Nina Totenberg? As the equine visaged hit lady of NPR she said that she hoped that one of Senator Helms’s grandchildren got AIDS.

Do you remember when Alec Baldwin said that “Congressman Henry Hyde should be stoned to death”?

How about Michael Moore wishing that more Republicans had died on 9/11?

Sean Penn, the special friend of Castro and Chavez, suggested terminal rectal cancer as a policy towards anyone in opposition to him.

Why wasn’t the movie “The Assassination of George W. Bush” denounced as being filled with “bile and vitriol”?

Even a knowledge not past cursory would show that my examples have one common thread.

They are all modern American Liberals.

Apparently none of them makes the cut when you call the roll of “bile and vitriol” spewers.

Could it be that you have “no enemies on the Left”? Could it be another syndrome common to mALs everywhere? Arnold Lunn, in the middle of a “low dishonest decade”, named it “eclectic indignation”.

Speaking of contemporary Sophists, whatever happened to Mrs. Clinton’s crusade to find the big money roots of the “vast Right-Wing conspiracy”? It’s been 15 years since she asked her fawning friends and sycophants in the media to find out who was after her husband. It’s about the same time that OJ has been trying to find his wife’s killers. Any updates on either of them? [Vlad Cheney, the evil twin of former VP Darth Cheney, gets my vote.] Didn’t Senator Clinton say, in voice that made banshees sound like a Glee Club of Suzan Boyles, that she was “sick and tired” of being told that she was unpatriotic because she was opposed to President Bush? Didn’t she say that General Petraeus was a liar? Was there any “bile and vitriol” there?

Senator Durbin [D- Il] compared American military personnel to Nazis. Beyond “bile and vitriol” shouldn’t that have entered the realm of “blood libel”?

When “bile and vitriol”, particularly in American politics, are mentioned it is good to have some knowledge of the campaigns of 1800 and 1876. They make last year’s campaigns look like a garden party. And they did it without electricity!

The incumbent in 1800 actually had a law passed that made it illegal to criticize the government. He was not returned to office.

Silly me, but I assume you know that the Democratic Party and the New York Times wanted a negotiated settlement with the South in the Civil War. Does that mean that they both favored slavery? Since both acquiesced in calling Abraham Lincoln a “baboon” does that mean that they were complicit in his assassination?

Did “bile and vitriol” cooked in a “climate of hate” cause dedicated Marxist, Lee Harvey Oswald, to shoot John Kennedy?

Sirhan Sirhan shot Robert Kennedy because he thought it would help his countrymen. What “bile and vitriol”, other than that of any anti-Semite, caused him to so act?

Should any blame be given to Jodie Foster for the shooting of the Great Reagan? [Can you imagine Walter Mondale playing poker with Gorbachev at Reykjavik? I can’t either.]

Edmund Burke, another descendant of those pesky Greeks, said the never ending conflict in any society is between freedom and order. What happened in Tucson was the work of a drug crazed mad man. It is anathema for a modern American Liberal even to entertain the idea that evil, evil as real as your boot, exists. The group instinct is to control, to stifle, to limit freedom in the name of the common good.

Tread lightly on curbing anyone’s speech.


“Free men speak with free tongues”


Kevin Smith


PS – Has your 11 year old daughter, the one who is worried about Florida enforcing Federal laws about immigration, studied the life of Amy Carter? Who can forget her father, the worst President of the 20th century, using his daughter’s supposed fear of nuclear proliferation in his debate with Governor Reagan. Perhaps you could assign your civic minded daughter to find out if the words “aid and comfort to the enemy”, words found in the Constitution, apply to Senator Reid [D-NV] when he said “the war is lost”?