Letter to the Editor

( what follows is a guest post of sorts, filed under Politics and Current Events )

Earlier this year, reader Carlos left a great series of comments on a post by Fred Carach. (“Kiss Real Estate Goodbye – An Appraiser’s Viewpoint“). I emailed Carlos to thank him for his readership and commentary. In the course of the email exchange, Carlos lamented how in this modern age, his letters to the editor of his local paper kept going unpublished.

While this blog has a minuscule readership compared to the Letters section of the mighty Miami Herald, Carlos’ letter is so passionately eloquent that it deserves *some* exposure. Carlos doesn’t (yet) have a blog of his own, so I’m glad to lend him mine for a bit.

I should say that while I share some of the sentiments in the letter, I’m not in complete agreement with Carlos. The letter is quite critical of President Obama. I could write a similar one about George Bush… Or Bill Clinton… Or to lesser degree, Ronald Reagan (I have a soft spot there). In my own opinion, most U.S. Presidens have done little to promote and advance individual liberty, and much to increase stupid and wasteful government control over our lives. Nevertheless, Carlos makes a great point about the degraded symbolism of the Honored Guest at the State Of The Union address.

Here’s Carlos…

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Miami, Florida

Gentlemen:

Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan aboard an American boat in California, 1964. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Since Ronald Reagan first seated Lenny Skutnik next to the First Lady in the State of the Union gallery in 1982, Presidents during major addresses have recognized 40 such heroic Americans who have achieved extraordinary accomplishments of exceptional citizenry.  

Today we have a President who seats a symbolic victim in this same place.   

Muddled in process and politics, he rallies popular resentment on industrious folk and American self reliance with his continued protracted ineffectiveness.

A collectivist leader of people, he perennially sees all of life as unfair and unjust, our American life as static that must be limited by committee decree, and that the only way we can make some of us better off is by making some of us worse off.  How archaic!

The great leveler, the instiller of a false sense of entitlement, our divider-in-chief continues to incite and draw on the basest of human emotions, avarice and class envy, with his shallow, now stale rhetoric of mendacity as he drags out this same repeated failure for time immemorial, the tired old collectivist creed of sloth and deceit, as he seeks ultimately a life by government ration for all of us.

It is a creed where equality and environmentalism trumps everything under the sun, even the future of our young.

(The 40 are detailed by Stephen Frantzich in his book, “Honored Guest:  Citizen Heroes and the State of the Union”.)

The President’s Press Secretary has said that this State of Union Address would be bookends to his speech at Osawatomie, Kansas last month.

One hundred years ago, a proven leader of men, a vibrant, virile man of decisive action who could well lead and inspire industry within people ventured to a very small town in East Kansas. 

Having been a Calvary Colonel, a Police Chief, a Navy Secretary, a New York Governor, a Vice President and a President he could relate well to an industrious populace of proud, productive, self-reliant Americans, patriots with the work ethic of a strapping lumberjack.  

Rough and ready Teddy Roosevelt drew a crowd of 30,000 to tiny Osawatomie, Kansas as he spoke proudly of the unlimited potential of industrious Americans who saw America’s promise as boundless and true, drawing on a book by Herbert Croly, “The Promise of American Life”.

A century later in stark contrast, what have we now but a President who draws but a mere crowd of 1,200 in an era when you can easily hop in your car and traverse paved roads and interstate highways to the very same Osawatomie, Kansas at its only high school to hear him speak of his own perceived limits on modern American life, and of his view of American despair.  

President Barack Obama - State of the Union speech 2012

A President of such protracted ineffectiveness who will say anything not to lead, a community organizer that rallies popular resentment on industrious folk that earn what they have and save, and wallows in sloth and his own perceived inequality and unfairness in all of American life drawing on the basest of human emotions inciting class envy with authority desperately seeking re-election having no record to run on.  

What have we but an untried, inexperienced President in pampers within an empty suit with an increasingly desolate voice of folly who can better relate to an effete interior decorator with his own soft creed of mollycoddle, sloth, and deceit.  

A President who sees the federal government on a street corner handing out a $1,000 every second and thinks the line will someday get shorter.

Ben Franklin once said, “House guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days”.

To diminishing crowds, this President repeats a shallow spineless collectivist rhetoric of mendacity that after nearly three years has gone stale, rancid and whose voice will soon fade out with little more than a whimper cast high upon the heap of collectivism compost and its long historic failures from time immemorial.Sincerely,
Carlos Lumpuy
Since 1960 on Champlain StreetWhether professional or personal, all human relationships have at their core and as its basis, one singular and fundamental premise:
Respect.
Without it, there can be no relationship, and we fail not only our positions, our service, our labor, and ourselves, but those and all that surrounds us.

-Carlos Lumpuy, Landlord, Miami, Washington, D.C.

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What do you think, readers? Had you heard of the Honored Guest tradition before? Harsh criticism of President Obama, or not?
Big fan of Ol’ Rough-and-Ready? 30,000 is indeed an incredible crowd to attract at a rally in those times of limited means of communication. Comments/opinions welcome. As politics can be a touchy subject, please keep discourse civil.