Letters from Feb. 13, 2008

Boy Scout breakfast

Locke’s distortions an insult

Ex-governor Locke’s address to the Boy Scouts of America fund-raising breakfast (“Kitsap Scouts get an earful from Locke,” Feb. 9) revealed Locke’s “Hate-America” agitprop and bad history lesson that insulted the Scouts, attendees and citizens. Locke, claiming BSA Eagle rank, foreswore the Scout Oath of “duty to God and country . . . to keep oneself morally straight” in his irresponsible claims that Franklin D. Roosevelt and the American people operated “concentration camps” and that Japanese Americans were subject to unconstitutional civil rights violation. Mr. Locke: don’t insult FDR and your guests with left-wing conjuring. FDR’s actions were and remain constitutional and a military necessity. Apparently Ex-Gov. Locke was using FDR’s 1941 Executive Order 9066 to get to his real target: President Bush and a USA war against terrorism and Islamic fanaticism. No, Mr. Locke, President Bush has obeyed U.S. law in his war on terrorism and to state otherwise is both seditious and a supreme insult to the young Scout leaders at that worthy fund-raiser breakfast.

Save your left-wing diatribes and disinformation for a deserving crowd such as ACLU, Move.on.org or a George Soros soiree. Our Scouts deserve more than warmed-over Bush Derangement Syndrome from the guest speaker. Furthermore your Hate-America shtick was originally presented at the Bainbridge Japanese Memorial event on March 30, 2007. Given that audience, perhaps your distortions were well received — perhaps.

You owe the Scouts an apology for falsely and maliciously defaming FDR, President Bush and the American people. I say to you about your lies: Let It Never Happen Again.

JAMES M. OLSEN

Bainbridge Island

Presidential primary

A general vote would be sensible

If it’s safe to say money runs the country, then is it as safe to say the moneyed run the country?

Why limit presidential contestants in national debates only to the two political parties, which decide who can and who can’t? Where’s the sense of spending time and billions on caucuses, primaries and Super Tuesdays when a fairer and more sensible way is to simply let a general vote of the public decide on a president every fourth November?

Why not have a national program to equally fund all political contestants for their campaigns? How can only four states of the 50 decide which four candidates may continue?

P.S. OK, Why not let me run the country? It can’t be any worse than what we’ve been dragged through these last seven years — with a man who’s not president dictating through his hand puppet!

ROBERT BALCOMB

Silverdale