Tackling the liberal agenda and selective memory

I knew Todd Cardin (“Road to revolt,” Daily Inter Lake, December 28). I knew him quite well, actually, as we shared a writers’ critique group for a number of years in the early 2000s. He was a good person. As a therapist, he cared about kids with serious psychological and addictive issues, but tempered his compassion with a liberal (no pun intended) dose of reality. That is why it is disturbing to read his liberal anti-conservative rant, a diatribe probably stimulated by attending graduate school at the University of Montana in the Republic of Missoula!

First, Todd should realize that both Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives are burdened by inflexibility. Neither side is completely correct and neither is completely wrong. Conservatives aren’t all “white, heterosexual, evangelical Christians,” or I, for example, would be excluded. I am not against all abortions, but pithing a viable 8-month-old fetus rather than deliver it to a deserving couple for adoption is so obviously wrong that I can’t imagine anyone with an ounce of morality not seeing that viewpoint. Yet liberals will fight to the death for late-term, unfettered access, taxpayer-funded abortion. 

Gay marriage is a right for liberals. Yet if a devout Christian baker or florist declines to provide their services because they disagree in principle, they are sued and driven out of business. Nonsense! Find someone else to do your wedding. Why would you even want to pay someone who isn’t sympathetic to your gay marriage crusade? 

If I were head of an anti-gay-marriage group, I would seek out gay providers and demand they provide services for my anti-gay-marriage events. The process should work both ways. One should also examine the history of liberal agenda development. Just as abortion began as a relatively rare first-trimester procedure, the first step in gay rights was spousal benefits, then gay marriage, and, I predict, soon the Catholic Church will be faced with a demand for a gay wedding ceremony, just as the Little Sisters of the Poor have been told they have to hire a third party to provide abortion as part of Obamacare for employees despite their Catholic religious beliefs. 

Todd also seems to have selective memory of the housing crisis and economic collapse in 2008. I certainly agree that mortgage credit default swaps by big banks and insurers was pure greed, but I also recognize that liberals in Congress continuously pushed for more relaxed lending standards so even people who could never afford a house could get a no-down-payment loan with no hope of repayment. And now, after only six years, we are again hearing liberals push for banks to make mortgage loans more accessible. Whose fault will the next massive failure be? Conservatives? 

Equating the global-warming hoax with environmental pollutants that sicken children is inexcusable alarmism on Todd’s part. Most conservatives agree with clean air and water. But crippling our coal and oil and gas industries to save the planet from the hoax of global warming and then taking credit for increased oil independence as a result of drilling on private land not federal land is the gall of liberalism.

Putting up windmills and solar farms before developing storage capacity and improving the transmission grid so it is practical is foolish. Delaying the Keystone XL pipeline for environmental concerns while shipping oil by rail and truck at much greater risk is foolish. And letting burned trees rot in the forest and overgrown forests burn and send massive amounts of ash and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is also foolish.

Todd doesn’t even mention a debt of $18 trillion, which, depending on which brilliant economist you believe, is no problem at all, or will reduce us to the status of Greece defaulting on our loans and crippling the U.S. dollar. In my non-economist view, the minute there is an alternative world’s reserve currency, as the IMF is dying to accomplish, we are bankrupt. The only reason we are viable is because we are the best game in town. If Obama and those who follow him keep us on this path, I fear we are doomed. 

But the main point that Todd is missing is the need for thoughtful, reasoned solutions to problems. Neither conservative nor liberal, Republican nor Democrat ideology is 100 percent correct. 

Rather than looking at the benefit of outlawing late-term abortion except in cases of REAL danger to the mother (not a liberal doctor saying it is a danger without reasons), we hear how this is the “camel’s nose under the tent” toward reversing Roe v. Wade and outlawing all abortions. 

Rather than monitoring loggers to assure they do a good job thinning overgrown forests, conservationist liberals fight every logging contract and replanting despite the fact that according to the Forest Service and the Department of Agriculture we have 70 percent of the forested land that existed in 1630 and that number has been stable since 1907. 

To show my liberal side, I believe the wealthiest and greediest in the corporate presidents’ offices need to be curtailed. They should be rewarded in proportion to what the stockholders and GOOD employees receive. Too high a reward prompts cheating to show false growth. Such cheating and failure to achieve should result in financial punishment, not a platinum parachute with a landing in another cushy presidential office. 

Same with hedge fund managers. If investors lose, these fast and loose players should lose proportionally. Does anyone believe that movie stars, sports figures, college football coaches, etc., deserve salaries of $5 million to $40 million a year. What value do they add to society? But your daughter, Todd, should get into Stanford if she wants to go there and has the grades, and should not be pushed aside by a minority student with lesser qualifications and who, studies have shown, is less likely to graduate. 

That is not exclusionary or not wanting to help the less fortunate in society. No, Todd, that is just fair! 

Myerowitz is a resident of Columbia Falls.