Kucinich with artist and political commentator Mike Dater; Portsmouth, NH; Super Sunday 2007.
This is a letter to the editor which I wrote in response to a June 10, 2007 editorial in Foster's Sunday Citizen which jointly attacked Presidential candidates Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich. ( Foster's Sunday Citizen is the Sunday edition of my local paper, the Dover, NH Foster's Daily Democrat. It also serves as the Sunday edition of the Laconia Citizen— which is published by the same company.)
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Richardson and Kucinich mischaracterized
To the
editor:
Bill Richardson and Dennis Kucinich should, on some
level, be flattered that your editorial board saw fit to denounce
them in a June 10 editorial. They are both strong candidates who are
being ignored by the media.
I would like to say your
criticisms were way off the mark. You sneered at Richardson's
suggestion that the USA should boycott the 2008 Beijing Olympics by
saying: "Somehow Richardson believes the country of the
Tiananmen Square massacre and one that dictates how many children
families can have gives a hoot whether the United States attends the
games."
Gov. Richardson's recent foreign policy
experience is limited to three years as Bill Clinton's secretary of
energy, along with a brief stint as the ambassador to the United
Nations. It's not as if he has ever served on the editorial board of
a small-town newspaper in New Hampshire or anything of that nature.
But actually this time he is the one who is right. An American
boycott of the Beijing Olympics would make a huge difference to the
Chinese.
Aside from the economic losses a boycott would
cause, our absence would be noticeable — not just because we are
the most powerful nation on Earth, not just because we are the
Chinese biggest trading partner, but also because we have one of the
strongest Olympic teams. In 1980, we actually did boycott the Moscow
Olympics in what was then the communist Soviet Union, and that
boycott made a huge difference— as did the Soviets' 1984 boycott of
the Los Angeles Games.
You also mischaracterized Rep.
Kucinich's health-care plan. You can read the plan for yourself on
www.Kucinich.US. It does not call for "government-mandated price
controls." It is in fact a fairly conservative single-payer
health plan which he sums up as "enhanced Medicare for
everyone." It would, in fact, give patients and medical
providers more control over treatment, and it would take control away
from the bureaucrats at the HMOs and insurance companies.
Timothy
Horrigan
Durham
(Both Kucinich and Dater are artists, but that is someone else's work on the wall.)
The
Forgotten Liars: The novel by Timothy Horrigan
