I was in Eugene Oregon this week until Wednesday at a Move to Amend executive committee meeting. Interesting enough we were discussing stuff about power. Who has power? Why do they feel entitled to power? We also discussed many other topics including how progress is stifled. This group among one of its tenets is to promote amending the constitution to ensure money is not speech and to reverse Citizen’s United.

Interesting enough as I checked my email while on the plane back I saw some of our Kingwood Area Democrats rather upset with some letter to the editor (LTE) responses to specifically two of my op-eds but with a sentiment to all the many op-eds written by many knowledgeable Kingwood Area Democrats (Deborah Mowrey, Karen & Bruce Menke, Marc Croes, Russell James, Michelle Michon, & many others). The specific op-eds referenced were Gamed By Healthcare Debate and Long Flight IDs America’s Problem.

The types of responses below are intended to lower one’s morale with the expectation that if they demean, in this case my writing it would somehow force me in a corner or silence me. The anti-American accusation & rhetoric is the standard Republican modus operandi used to stop any debate for fear of being portrayed as anti-patriotic. The reality is that many Democrats have fallen for these tactics for a long time. We allowed President Bush and his cohorts to use it to acquire immense presidential powers that have cost the country dearly, (e.g., Democratic support for the Iraq war). These responses will not stop neither me nor any of our very active Kingwood Area Democrats from voicing their fact based opinions and using all platforms to attempt to both counter the fallacies most Americans hear daily and to give those that need an extra push the backing to get involved and make a difference.

Following is the response I provided. A copy of the negative LTE’s is below.

Who Is The Anti-American I have one thing to say in response to both Mr. Fred Flickinger & Don Shoemake’s attempt at rebutting several of my pieces and implicitly some pieces written by other very knowledgeable Kingwood Area Democrats. Really? Is that all that you have got? When you have no substantive response you present provably skewed Heritage Foundation inspired data? You levy accusations of Anti-Americanism, bad grammar, run on sentences, verbosity, and pretentious use of words (in your opinions of course)? And you attempt to deflect from facts that materially affect every single American? Attempts of marginalization will no longer work. Attempts at quieting those that are real patriots will not work this time. You see, Americans are waking up to the deception that they have lived since the progressive decimation of our economy, the decimation of middle class wealth, and the stagnation of middle class wages that can be directly traced to supply side economics instituted in the 1980s and placed on steroids since. For too long we have valued capital over moral human values. My attempt is not to convince folks like you my friends. Drew Westen describes your mind set in his book The Political Brain better than I could. My attempt is to simply encourage those Americans that choose not to be willfully ignorant to be fully vocal and really take our country back. Not take our country back as some slogan, but make it a place where all truly have equal access to success with hard work. Most importantly I want to encourage folks to do real research on their own with raw data to force the government of the people to create a body of laws that stop, prevent, and reverse powerful entities from their continued pilfering of the middle class. Anyone working against these tenets is the Anti-American.