Dear Editor:
I love a good debate – I wish we had more on this campus. I still remember when Dr. Shanks took on a creationist. But for the time being, the only debates on campus seem to be in the letters in the East Tennessean, so let me comment on a couple of letters in the Nov. 14 issue about Tom Birchfield’s column.
Mark Peters said, “There was never such a thing as a surplus.” Right. Under the Clinton administration, there was no deficit, but there was always debt, left over from earlier administrations. The big question was, “In fat years do we pay down the debt we ran up in lean years, or do we spend hand over fist?” The Clinton administration actually put some of the surplus toward reducing the debt, but the debt is still huge. The Bush administration is back to deficit spending, which means the debt is increasing. Bush proposed his tax cuts while there was a surplus. I find it curious that Republicans still favor a tax cut now that a tax cut means we go deeper in debt.
Jennifer K. O’Connell said, “Isn’t one of the primary reasons for this war for our security?” That, of course, is the big question. Has this administration made the case that Iraq is a threat to the United States? If so, what is the evidence? Bush keeps repeating that Saddam Hussein is an evil man. Yes he is. But the world is full of evil men. Saddam has never attacked the United States.
Bush is accused of picking Iraq to attack, rather than some other evil dictatorship, because a friendly government in Iraq would sell us oil at a favorable price. Is that accusation baseless? I don’t know. I do know that when Dick Cheney left his job with Halliburton Company to become vice president, he got a huge amount of free money. When politicians accept huge gifts, they open themselves to the suspicion that the people who gave those gifts expect to get something in return. Oddly, Vice President Cheney’s official White House biography does not mention that he ever worked for an energy company. You can read that biography at www.whitehouse.com. Sorry. I mean, of course, dot gov.
Rick Norwood

Author