Trump bootlicker Pete Stauber

Some time ago I was told to be wary of Pete Stauber; he is not who/what he portrays himself to be. Rep. Stauber has gone out of his way to demonstrate that he is a loyal bootlicker to Donald Trump. Rep. Stauber from the moment he appeared with Trump's initial visit to Duluth set the stage for what we could expect; 'it's an honor to be on this stage with you President Trump.' Rep. Stauber's embracing of Trump's continual lies and criminal activities indicates a lack of integrity. His claims to his record as a police officer should cause every police officer to cringe. Every man and woman on the Duluth Police Force have more credibility than Rep. Pete Stauber.  

Tony Heikkila –Esko, Minnesota

GOP con-artist  

A couple of weeks ago, I was riding home from dialysis with a county driver.  He had his radio on, and was listening to a right-wing talk show.  As I listened, the talk show host made the dramatic and hyperbolic claim that President Biden had just issued a Presidential Decree saying he was going to "digitize the US monetary system. and start by getting rid of the one dollar bill. 

I'd heard nothing about this on any of the sites I listen to (MPR, NPR, CNN, MSNBC,) so I thought it was rather far-fetched, especially because Biden was visiting in a European country at that time.   After the host made his announcement, he brought in another speaker who went on to 'verify" what the host said, and then said some more demeaning things to make people think this was an abuse of power by Biden.   The dialogue followed the typical pattern of a sale's pitch, where the "terrible action" was revealed by people in the know." 

This was meant to make the listener see Biden as an "enemy," and  then, feel afraid.  Because of all the power and control the "enemy" had, the fear was meant to trigger anger in the listener, to then be directed by the host at the "scoundrel" doing this terrible deed.   Once the fear and anger hooked the listener, the enemy was named again so the blame for the hate and anger could be directed at the "enemy," Biden. 

The invited commentator was then brought in to continue the sales pitch, which he did by saying the only option the listener had to keep their money safe, was to invest in "lots and lots of GOLD," because gold was the only thing that couldn't be affected by a Presidential Decree.    

I've heard it said many times, in many different places, that right-wing GOP leaders want consumers and constituents to be afraid, as people are, then, easier to control .  The audience (or clients) are easily sucked in to this game, because they want to believe their "fears" are valid, so they can justify how they respond. The dominant, underlying attitude of this person is "No one can fool ME!!"  Con artists love this attitude in people, because  they're the easiest  to fool.  It's much harder to hook an person who's been seriously fooled to where his ego took a real "hit.  Their motto can and should become "Let the buyer beware, " 

Or, maybe, "Once bitten, twice shy."  

Gary Burt – Marble, Minnesota 

Yes, US foreign policy is this evil  

Peter Johnson says that he’s a longtime admirer of Phil Anderson. I am too but that’s where our agreement ends.  

Mr. Johnson’s criticisms of Phil Anderson are cribbed directly from the US mainstream media, which in turn takes its cues from Pentagon and State Department press releases. Like other classic apologists for US policy such as Bill Clinton and Barak Obama, Peter Johnson seems to feel that an admission of an occasional US shortcoming allows one to look past its many other deliberate wrongdoings. By the same token, pointing out the wrongdoings of others is taken as sufficient evidence that the US must be noble.  

This last claim is a clear example of logical fallacy but not the most egregious example of error and ignorance in this piece. Like most establishment US apologists, Johnson has little interest in and even less mastery of history. Most importantly, he totally omits the 75-year history of NATO’s march across Europe and beyond in spite of the frequent warnings by both US officials and the Russians. The kind of diplomacy that Phil Anderson refers to is precisely the lost opportunity to move Ukraine in the direction of a neutral buffer state for the sake of peace by promoting the existence of autonomous status for the large Russian-speaking areas of Crimea and SE Ukraine, which was the essence of the Minsk Accords.  Nevertheless, right-wing forces in Ukraine succeeded in thwarting these efforts and herein lie the ultimate origins of the war.

To note just one more omission, Mr. Johnson says nothing of the regime change in 2014 engineered by neocon Victoria Nuland, who was then rewarded with a promotion to Under Secretary for Political Affairs by Mr. Johnson’s fellow cold-war liberal Joe Biden.   In short, the US and NATO share the greatest guilt for the war due to their long-term orchestration of the conditions for the conflict, which could have been avoided by implementation of the Minsk accords. Germany first invaded Belgium in 1914 but as now that actual invasion was the culmination of a competition with pre-existing arch-imperialists France and Great Britain, which eventually led to yet another war and the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  

Such is the history of war and the contribution of its apologists like Mr. Peter Johnson.  

Robert Kosuth – Duluth, Minnesota