E-mail I sent to Mr. O'Rourke:
Dear Mr. O'Rourke,
You wrote: "On Sept. 10, 2001, half of his administration was implicated in the corporate scandals that were finally getting their moment in the sun. Bush's one victory--the large tax cut for the wealthy--was beginning to look not so victorious as the economy continued to sour."
You should be ashamed of yourself for the way you invented facts out of whole cloth. Bush's administration was not implicated in the corporate scandals; in fact, the Democrats put the skids on investigating Enron and other corporations because it turns out Ken Lay and his pals were much chummier with the Clintons. As one example, look at the skids greased by the Clintons for Enron to get a big contract in India.
Next, the idea that Bush's tax cuts were (1) large; and (2) for the wealthy is just a plain lie on both counts. The tax cuts were small by the standards set by Presidents Kennedy and Reagan. And the top 5% of taxpayers pay over half of the income taxes, meaning that any meaningful tax cut is going to affect the wealthy more than it does others. In fact, as shown here, the bottom 50% of wage earners pay less than 4% of income taxes.
If you have to resort to lies and half-truths in order to defend your beliefs, then perhaps you ought to re-examine those beliefs.
Best regards,
-Michael XXXXXXXXX
Dallas, Texas
You hit point after point right on their head. It won't matter to the writer who I'm sure knows about all this and was just trying to spread disinformation. But BS does not go through FR unchecked!