Letters to the Editor for July 15, 2020

Trump continues to cover for Putin

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here we are... stuck in the middle with Putin’s personal puppet. $100,000 bounties on an American corpse, triggered by Putin. Since you’ve lied over 20,000 times in the last few years, why would I believe you when you say, “I didn’t know anything about it.” And... here we go again... it’s a “hoax.” “Fake news.” And why didn’t you know about it? Isn’t that your job?

Read the daily PDBs you knucklehead. Your number one job is to protect and defend the citizens of this country. You can’t yell at your intelligence people, doing their sworn duty to try to fill your vacuous cranium with “intelligence reports.” You can’t have it both ways. Ignorance, stupidity and laziness is not an excuse for not knowing highly sensitive information handed directly to you. You can’t throw tantrums and dismiss information that may tell you explicitly that your master, Bad Vlad Putin, is a bad man, a murderer.

My advice Bungler-in-chief is to quit before you lose and the SDNY cuffs you like a serious person of interest, leading to surefire indictments. Take the next copter to a country or island that does not have extradition. And then a flight to Moscow. Of course, that might be a little dicey, if not poisonous, since you would no longer be Vlad’s boy. Better get some real intel before you make a rash decision.

Rick Van Alfen

Carson City

Tyranny of the mob

Radical progressives in Minneapolis and elsewhere reveal their true colors. With the explicit approval of left-wing civil authority and their media lapdogs, they rampage through our cities and towns, defacing and destroying public and private property. Their authoritarian proclivities and storm trooper mentality bode ill for society. Self-righteous, deceitful and intolerant sums them up nicely.

While the left espouses platitudes of inclusion and diversity, tolerance and diversity of thought is not their strong suit. It's their way or the highway and the rule of law be dammed. This isn’t about George Floyd or black lives, it never was. This is the left’s plan to defeat Donald Trump and remake America. It’s clear their failure to quell the violence and restore order were politically motivated and self-serving. Unable to win the hearts and minds of the electorate, they celebrate the mob as democracy dies.

In the marketplace of ideas, their cupboard is bare. So, when character assassination and their tired and worn out cries of racism, misogyny, homophobia, xenophobia, environmental peril fail, violence is their only option. These left-wing terrorists think they are saving the world, but in reality, they are paving the way for reeducation camps and killing fields.

If the mob wins, America loses, the republic falls, and woe to those who disagree.

Groveling and pandering won’t save you, you will never be woke enough to satisfy the mob. As Winston Churchill observed “Appeasement is feeding the alligator and hoping he eats you last.”

Mike Rodgick

Carson City

Social workers aren’t crime solvers

This is in response to Guy Farmer’s column of July 4 regarding defunding the police.

He describes a scenario in which a community safety team, including a social worker, responds to a crime scene, because the police have been abolished. Having worked as a professional social worker for 30 years, I know one would never respond to such a crime scene. It would be completely inappropriate as it would be out of their scope of practice. They should be responding to homelessness, child abuse, elder abuse, and persons experiencing a mental health crisis.

A social worker would not enter someone’s home and place blame as Farmer describes because their job is not to blame but to assess the problem, determine resources, and develop a plan to help solve the problem. Farmer’s scenario is hypothetical in the extreme. Law enforcement officers appropriately should be responding to and solving crimes.

I don’t see how throwing more money at law enforcement is going to help solve these familial, social and emotional problems. In many communities, the public human services departments have established 24-hour social work responses for adult protective, child abuse, and mental health services. These interventions cost little in comparison to police interventions as historically an officer costs twice as much as a social worker.

Lastly, rather than using the phrase “defund the police” a more descriptive term is “reallocation of resources.” Perhaps reframing of the issue makes the misnomer palatable to those fearing abolishment of law enforcement.

Janet Adams

Minden

Steps in the wrong direction

I agree wholeheartedly with Guy Farmer’s column July 11. Destroying statues, eliminating or rewriting our history, preventing free speech by shouting people down, destroying private and public property, and demonizing our police are serious steps toward totalitarianism. Everyone should read or reread the George Orwell novel “1984” published in 1949.

To achieve his goal of retaking America in November, I hope Farmer recognizes that the Democrat Party supports most of the recent steps to tear down and then “fundamentally change” our country and that the Republican Party resists at least some of them. A good first step in this effort would be to stop trashing President Trump.

Gary Ratekin

Gardnerville

Everyone taking state budget hits

Thousand of Nevadans have lost their jobs and face economic turmoil. Businesses have closed costing the owners revenue (and the state income). Many will not reopen; destroying owners dreams and investment.

State employees throughout this pandemic have continued to receive their salary, health insurance, retirement contribution, etc. For the state employees union to be moaning about its members having to furlough one day a month to help off set the budget deficit, or get merit raises, is simply despicable. A very good example of FDR lamenting about not allowing public employees to unionize. Public employees? I think not. Feeding at the public trough, definitely.

Theodore Bettker

Gardnerville

Trump is anything but articulate

Lynn Muzzy as I live and struggle to breath, your latest letter to the editor has me convinced that you just write these missives to "pull the legs" of us Flaming Wild Eyed Leftists. You almost had me fooled when you stated how articulate Donald Trump is.

If you think Trump is articulate then you would probably believe the earth is flat. Whoops, I apologize, you just might. Global warming is another issue but I must close this letter to you and go out and shovel the snow off my driveway. You are truly one of a kind.

Joel Flamenbaum

Carson City

Really, Fred LaSor and Guy Farmer?

Fred LaSor, in a very poor analogy, likens our recent protests to the revolutions in China and Cambodia in the 1960s and ’70s. One thing we might have in common with those situations is an out of control authoritarian leader. Fred goes on to blame the violence at some of the protests on Antifa and Black Lives Matter.

In actuality, the FBI and DHS have reported that far right and white supremacist groups were more likely to blame. Antifa isn’t even a very organized group but Fred would have us believe that they are well organized and well funded by secret forces that want to destroy us.

Fred then goes on to attack Speaker Pelosi for taking a knee for 8 minutes 46 seconds to honor George Floyd. “Has she no shame?”

Guy Farmer picks up on and praises Fred’s narrative and tells us that were going to end up like China if we don’t oppose the Crazy Left. Guy then tells us he doesn’t even know what white privilege is. Here’s a hint, maybe it is the privilege of living your life in ignorance of the systemic racism in our country.

Then for good measure, Guy for some reason injects immigration into the whole thing by offering us examples of good immigrants, like his late wife. I’ll bet that when she arrived at our border she wasn’t separated from her family and thrown in a cage. Just guessing.

Vincent Barnes

Carson City