Pete and I went to the same Ohio college, Class of 1969. We were members of the same fraternity. I introduced Pete to his wife. Sarah and I grew up in the same Ohio town. Pete voted for Donald Trump in 2016 and will do so again in 2020. Pete is a business-class Republican, a man who runs his own enterprise, plays by the rules, pays his taxes and owns a beautiful home in an upscale neighborhood.
Back in 2013, I enjoyed a one-night-stand at Pete and Sarah’s home. We sat for hours at the kitchen table, drinking beer, eating potato chips and reminiscing while poring through two hefty photo albums from the 1960s. The only political moment arose when Pete expressed his disapproval of his neighbor’s yard care crew, “illegal Mexicans with loud leaf blowers.” He was not happy about his tax dollars paying for Obama’s golf outings.
LETTER TO PETE / NOVEMBER 2019
With exactly one year until the 2020 election, an election that could go either way, you seem upset that Trump is taking so much shit from the Democrats. For the record… our country has a long history of extremely dirty politics.
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Rick Ungar / Forbes
It was the election of 1800 when President John Adams and Vice-President Thomas Jefferson, the two highest elected officials in the land, each a pivotal player in the creation of our nation, squared off in a race for the White House and established a tradition of negative campaigning.
Not unlike much of the mud-slinging we experience in modern elections, the dirty work, back in the earliest days of the nation, was often left to surrogates. One such surrogate was the influential President of Yale University, a John Adams supporter, who publicly suggested that were Jefferson to become the president, “we would see our wives and daughters the victims of legal prostitution.”
The concern was amplified by an influential and highly partisan Connecticut newspaper’s warning that electing Jefferson would create a nation where “murder, robbery, rape, adultery and incest will openly be taught and practiced.”
Not to be outdone by the Federalist president’s attacks, Jefferson had a few negative narratives of his own. One particularly stinging attack came via one James Callender, an influential journalist of the time whose incendiary pamphlets had been secretly funded by Thomas Jefferson and who had an ax to grind for having been prosecuted and imprisoned by the Adams Administration for violating The Sedition Act of 1798.
Callender wrote that Adams was an angry, lying, warmonger; a "repulsive pedant" and "gross hypocrite" who “behaved neither like a man nor like a woman but instead possessed a hideous hermaphroditical character."
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And now, in 2019, I have found relief in distancing myself from network news and cable news. I have finally realized that TV pundits are in the business of toying with our emotions, telling stories that are neither true nor false, only credible. Every Liberal I know will vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who that person is. Every Conservative I know will once again vote for Trump. We don’t need any more analysis, bickering and histrionic outrage. Take-home message… Over the next year, we must do what we have to do to protect our sanity and our emotional well-being.
After 72 years as an American citizen, born and raised in Ohio to Eisenhower Republican parents… in my first 15 years awash in Red Scare and Cold War propaganda and the likes of Joe McCarthy, Nikita Khrushchev, Sputnik, the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis… the very last thing I thought the Republican Party would become was a Russian asset. Now, I look at a Republican politician or a member of the Republican base and I see the face of Vladimir Putin. This traitorous turn gives new meaning to the term “red states.”
Socrates / NYT reader comment: “Today’s Republican Party has devolved into a Lord of the Flies collection of lawless 9-year-old boys who think that the complete destruction of civility is a winning strategy. Their utter disregard for truth, facts, common sense, diplomacy, the United States Constitution and human morality have come close to sinking the republic into their Trumpian swamp of unapologetic greed, corruption and lies. If decent American citizens do not rise up and actively reject this Republican Frankenstein monster, this country will go down in flames.”
After watching and listening to the first five hours of Day One of the impeachment hearings, my research department stole this bumper sticker idea: “With Trump, All Roads Lead to Putin.”
[Author’s note: In the coming election in November 2024, I am voting for… Sanity.]
No. I haven't seen Joe Bennett since high school graduation. The one person you might recognize, other than myself, is the blond, Wendy Wohler. All in the photo have just graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
Is that Joe Bennett on the left.?