LETTER: Disagrees with Buffington's column on Trump

So, Mike, who would you have us vote for? Biden who opened the border to a flood of millions of illegal aliens, botched the withdrawal from Afghanistan and is rapidly undoing the successful peace moves Trump brought to the Middle East? Biden who depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve safety net to half what he inherited in a cynical bid to lower oil prices before elections? Biden who is trying to buy votes again, with our money, by forgiving debts students entered into voluntarily? Biden whose “diversity hires” of key cabinet positions and judicial candidates lowers standards and makes a mockery of excellence? Biden who can barely put two sentences together unless hopped up? Biden on whose watch grotesque spending has driven heavy inflation putting housing and other prices out of reach for many of our fellow citizens?

Presidential personality does not affect our lives, their policies do. Yet your screed had not one word about Trump’s policies versus Biden’s. Instead it was wall-to-wall personality attack and speculation. You are better than that.

You talk of Trump bible sacrilege and heresy but all I hear is hate. If selling bibles is such sacrilege, all I can say is the world could use more bibles. It doesn’t need another four years of this administration’s dreadful policies.

Sincerely,

Joe Counter

Winder

(Buffington responds: As always Joe, thanks for writing. I anticipated that I’d get some flak, but as usual, most of it is an attempt to pivot to a discussion about Biden and to avoid any effort to actually comment on what I was writing about. For the record, I wasn’t writing about Biden. Interestingly, you make no criticism of Trump’s egregious actions and deleterious rhetoric, yet my writings are “emotional hatred?” Do you hold my words to a higher standard than you do his? I disagree that personality isn’t important, especially when a cult of personality has been created around a man who uses false propaganda as central to his political campaign. Ask those who suffered under Stalin or Hitler if cults of personality are benign attributes in political leaders. Trump wasn’t the only choice here; Republicans had several other candidates to choose from to represent the party, but overwhelmingly chose Trump, both in 2016 and again this year. While I agree that many of Biden’s policies are terribly flawed, is that reason enough to cast a vote for Trump, a man who attempted to overturn the 2020 election results by creating fake electors and inspired a violent intrusion into the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to stop the counting of electoral college votes? Character does matter in our political leaders and those who think otherwise are mistaken. Trump has proven, repeatedly, that he is devoid of any character or decency. Frankly, I’d rather see bad public policies than to have a man in the White House who is morally unfit for the office. Been there, done that. Republicans could have made another choice this year, but they didn’t, which, as I pointed out in the column, speaks to the disintegration of traditional Republican morality. I don’t hate Donald Trump, but I despise the inane conspiracy-driven cultism he inspires. America should be better than Trump.)