Lerner's free pass has consequences
So the Department of Justice exonerates former IRS manager Lois Lerner, and the press, pundits and president quibble over whether her acknowledged misdeeds rise to the level of corruption and criminality.
In so doing, all miss the point, which is that her abuse of her position has significantly eroded something far more intangible and far more important than criminal charges, and that is the trust of the American people.
Trust is the cement which binds together the body politic; once lost, it is almost impossible to regain.
If the American people do not trust the tax-collecting bureaucracy and have reason to fear it, far more than tax collections will suffer.
Similarly, politicians and the press continue to miss the point with the Planned Parenthood videos, including the most recent one.
The legal issues are not paramount. The much-disputed claim that these videos have somehow been edited is not the first thing.
What is undisputed is the persons on the camera actually said what they did, and most importantly that they spoke of dismembering recognizably human fetuses with such clinical and callous disregard.
That such an organization should receive a penny of federal tax dollars is unconscionable.
Gary Lindley, Lookout Mountain, Ga.
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Today's Republicans are Civil War leftovers
In 1861, the Southern plantation aristocracy seduced working people and yeoman farmers into defending slavery by convincing them they were fighting for their homes, their women and that illusory abstraction, "states' rights." But Google Tennessee's 1861 secession declaration. States' rights isn't mentioned. It was all about slavery.
In 1863, Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens called slavery "the very cornerstone of our republic the immediate cause of the late rupture and present insurrection." No ambiguity or minced words there.
More than a century later, borrowing on the Southern planters' strategy, today's Republicans have targeted the most vulnerable, impressionable, auto-suggestive group in the country for votes, the Southern evangelical fundamentalists.
They avoid addressing domestic or international issues about which this group knows or cares little, and push emotional hot buttons dear to fundamentalists' hearts: school prayer, abortion and gay rights.
But after 50 years of promises, the Republicans have done absolutely zilch on any of these concerns. Church-state separation is as strong as ever, Roe v. Wade is still on the books and gays are continually gaining new rights. But the Southern religious right continues to vote as it is led. Is that weird or what?
George B. Reed, Rossville