Right Winger Discovers Letters to the Editor

I'm back from my vacation swilling chardonnay in Sonoma, tanned, rested, and ready to rock.

First on my take-down list is Yet Another Insufferable Right Wing Lawyer/Blogger, "LearnedFoot" of the Kool Aid Report, which specializes in bitching about the opinion page of the Star Tribune.

In the middle of sliming Senate District 60 DFL chair Joel Bergstrom as a "vomitous mass", LearnedFoot throws in an offside jab at yours truly, so I couldn't resist responding.

What's got LearnedFoot's panties in such a bunch? Why, he's shocked -- shocked -- to discover that activists use letters to the editor to promote their agendas!

In this case, Joel Bergstrom wrote a letter to the editor of the Star Tribune noting the irony of Republican state representative Julianne Ortman calling for more money to train police on the same day Minneapolis announced another round of budget cuts for police services. Bergstrom sensibly asks, where's the money?

But for LearnedFoot, the important thing is that Joel's letter isn't signed "Chair, SD60 DFL":

Here's a gravitas-laden question: shouldn't letter writers be required by the editor to disclose their political affiliations if the writer serves in some official role for a party? Those that submit commentary articles are required to do so. It strikes me as rather sleazy that letter writers can be clothed in a mantle of seeming uber-mensch objectivity - "hey, it's just my opinion" - when really all these people are doing is fulfilling their duties as DFL talking-point shills.

I was curious about Joel's take on all this so (check this out) I asked him. Here's what he said:

I guess in his world everything I do is in my capacity as Chair. On this letter in particular I was not representing the views of SD60, but myself, so I did not identify myself as chair b/c it would not be appropriate to ascribe my letter to all SD60 DFLers. And to act as if the republicans don't have a machine that does similar p.r. is a joke.

Interestingly, he does not address the content of the letter itself, the main question of which is: how does Ortman propose to pay for this?

Those of us who are both activists and private citizens have to be able to separate our activities, because being an activist is not the whole of what we do. It's not like we get paid, unlike some right-wing shills I could name. I don't post my personal opinion on the DFL blog; I don't post the DFL's opinion on my personal blog or in my letters to the editor; and I never represent the opinions of my employer. If what I'm writing represents the official position of an organization, I'll indicate that.

And if Mr. "LearnedFoot" has a problem with that, he can shove his learned foot up his erudite ass.

With that out of the way, let me endorse Steve Gilliard's ingenious Fast Boat Crusade. It's the op-ed analogue to Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy. Gilliard wants ordinary Americans to move on from letters to the editor to full fledged op-ed pieces. The genius of this idea is very simple: it creates a grassroots "farm team" of op-ed columnists who may provide some counter to the legions of corporate-funded "scholars" at right wing think tanks like Cato, AEI, Heritage, and the Manhattan Institute who get paid to spew out drivel onto the nation's opinion pages. It might not work, but it's worth a try. The name comes from the great American hero John Paul Jones: "I shall need a fast boat for I intend to sail into harm's way."