November 10, 2013
Letter to the Editor
The Miami Herald
3511 NW 91st Avenue
Miami, FL 33172

RE: How rough a ride? – Some comments on your “Men are not angels” editorial today about the horrors, the horrors of partisan politics as if there were any other kind.

Sirs,

1800 and 1828 were landmark years.

They were years without electricity but not without vitriol and billingsgate. They were the dirtiest, most vile, most rotten campaigns in American History.

Even 1864, what with the forebears of today’s Democratic Party in a cabal with its flack, the New York Times, calling Lincoln a “baboon” and supporting slavery by calling for a cease fire with the states in rebellion, did not come close. [As an afterthought it would have been better for the country if General Sherman had flattened the South. a la General Lemay’s flattening of Japan. The Romans never had a problem with the Carthaginians after Scipio firebombed them.]

1960 was another great year for campaigns. “Just buy enough to win”. “I’m not paying for any landslides”, was Corsair Joe Kennedy’s retort about money spent in the West Virginia primary.

The Democratic candidate in 1960 said that there was a “missile gap”. How, the compliant media never asked, could the President who led 10,000,000 men in battle and made Hitler eat his gun less than a year after he got to Europe would let his country descend into mortal peril? The answer was that he didn’t.

Mean spirited, nasty, ad hominem, dirty, racist, sexist, and homophobic campaigns are, to paraphrase H. Rap Brown, a noted community activist of the ‘60s “as American as apple pie”.

“Congress shall make no law…” means that if George Soros and the Koch Brothers decide to tell their supporters that the parents of their opponents did not know each very long and that their brief meeting was recorded neither in the rectory nor in the country registry it’s OK.

We tamper with that process at our own peril.

But wait. There’s more.

You imply that Governor Scott’s attempt to purge the voter rolls is lower case racism.

A quick check of voting fraud stories in Miami/Dade County will show that 100% of them involve Democrats. In a bit of unintended irony the overwhelming majority of the alleged perpetrators is non-Caucasian.

I had an uncle in Jersey City who voted the straight Democratic ticket – Row A All the Way – for 15 years after he died. He was White.

Let the games begin!




Kevin Smith