Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor The Sun Sentinel

April 4, 2018

Rosemary O’Hara – Editorial Page Editor

The Sun Sentinel

500 E. Broward Blvd

Ft. Lauderdale, FL 33394

RE: “The wind and the rain may enter…” – Facebook intrusions and “poking” as described in your signed editorial today.

Ms O’Hara,

To Hell with Facebook! Starbucks scares the Bejeezus out of me.

It’s been years since last I was in one. I learned today that one will open in the local Publix. It may not be enough to drive me to Winn-Dixie but it gives me pause. I made the mistake, common to deplorable homophobic xenophobes, before the enlightened rule of Barack the Beneficent, of asking for a large coffee by name; that is to say “Large coffee to go.” I did not use the pidgin Eye-Tie and the secret handshake coupled with the seasonal color that insiders use to get a friggin’ cup of coffee. The semi-androgynous barista looked at me “like my nose was being eaten by weevils”.

A brief digression is in order. In addition to illuminating things technological you limn things political. You can’t help it. As a practicing modern American Liberal ink-stained wench you have no choice. It’s in the warp and woof of your DNA.

Here comes the other shoe.

You backhandedly bitch slap the Trump for using trayf campaign practices. [I was born and raised in Bayonne, NJ so pardon me if I wet my pants when a mAL hectors about the do’s and the don’ts of campaign ethics.]

The SEC says that omission of a material fact constitutes civil fraud. 1934 Act,10b5. Look it up.

Before it was formalized in 2013, the metrics used to construct the rubric that Cambridge Analytics, used later by Candidate Trump, were used by Candidate Obama. It was a strategy for which he was universally praised. I guess cat skinning and almost truth telling are subjective things. No sense being a half-assed resistor.

It is a trait common to mALs to castigate the 2^nd sinner while stuffing the first wrong-doer down the always convenient memory hole, the one dug by zealots well versed in “eclectic indignation”, the one-character trait without which they would go mad. For example, President Bush 41 was vilified for telling us what Willie Horton, that mad cap, crazy kid was up to in his dash for immortality as a parole violating murdering rapist. Would it make me more deplorable to point out that Willie Boy’s exploits were brought to our attention by Senator Albert Arnold Gore, Jr. He later became known as Vice President Alpha Gump who told  us we would die in 10 years of terminal sun burn, something about the depleting ozone layer which I think was connected to the oil depletion allowance,maybe. Alas, he told us that 27 years ago. Speaking of thanatoptic viewpoints, Candidate Donna Shalala told us we would all die from AIDS in 10 years. Would it make me more of a turd to point out that she issued this warning in 1998? She issued it the same day that President Handsome Billy from Hot Springs, the King of the One-Eyed Oval Office Trouser Snakes, told us that Global Warming was caused by hot days in August which were caused, or so the consensus of science tells us, by Global Warming. Have the dreaded Word Police proscribed tautology? 

You say “a tremendous number of people have been ‘poking’ me”. I’m sure, I think, that you don’t mean it in the Yeatsian sense of poking to “petit mort” because I too have been ‘poked’. I don’t know what it means also.

There is a venerable old saw – I imagine by now that all saws are old and venerable, particularly the old and venerable ones, right? – “pig in a poke”. It is an apt description of “shovel ready jobs”, or “a red line in the sand”, or “they speak Austrian in Vienna”, or “We are the ones we have been waiting for”, and “the Marine Corpse is in all 57 or 58 states”.

The “poke” I thought about was the one in “Lonesome Dove”, remember? Augustus McRae would cut the cards with Lorena Wood. Both the winner and the loser would get a “poke”. Talk about flipping with a two-headed penny! Even when Gus lost he got a “poke”. For the uninitiated, a “Poke” was short hand for a horizontal tango. By the way, just like Row A in Hudson County, Gus never lost.

You say that we “accept the loss of privacy for security”. It was Edmund Burke, still another remarkable Irishman, who said the trade-off in a society is always between freedom and order. You can’t have both.

Kevin Smith

PS – “…. but the King may not enter unless invited.”