Dear editor,
In his Jan. 15 "Your Turn," Dr. B.J. Paschal attempts to take Russell Greim to task on undefined issues.
Paschal claims that Greim denies the obvious when caught, yet he fails to give examples. Instead, he goes on to use pejoratives to demonize conservatives and uses an ironically "vacuous" and vague line of argument himself. In fact, most of his piece seems to be ad hominem attacks against conservatives in general (i.e. referring to us as "that hairy horde of right-wing yahoos known as 'Boobus americanus'") and the piece generally takes on the characteristics of a rant rather than the usually well-reasoned (if terribly misguided) letters we so often see from him.
There are two exceptions to this. The first is Paschal's taking Greim to task about calling Tom Daschle a "partisan obstructionist." Even here, he misses the point of the charge. That Daschle is out of sync with his party 20 percent of the time is not the point, and neither is that he does agree with the party line 80 percent of the time. The point is, Daschle is a partisan obstructionist simply because he has managed to obstruct many advances of the conservative agenda -- he intentionally and adamantly blocked all sorts of judicial nominees that President Bush put forth simply on the grounds that they were too conservative. (Look at Charles Pickering and Priscilla Owen, for example.)
Given these facts, he is quite obviously a partisan obstructionist. Just because the term holds a pejorative meaning for many does not mean it is not true on the basis of fact.
The only other exception was his claim about "Big Media," which he stated was Republican-owned. Whether Big Media is Republican-owned (which is an unsubstantiated and highly debatable claim), then why is it that the only conservative mainstream television news outlet is Fox News Channel (as compared to CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, and to a degree, MSNBC)?
At the very least, "Big Media" has a liberal bent. Of course, that is an unsubstantiated claim itself -- but then, I'm in good company.
Perhaps Dr. Paschal should clarify and support future statements, rather than quoting various 'intellectuals' and raining down pejoratives on anyone not in lock-step with his own views.
James Mahoney
junior
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