Pay attention
Kudos to Lynette Brinker for performing the duty of a citizen so admirably (Lewiston Tribune, Jan. 4, via Idaho County Free Press).
She spoke against the PragerU/Hillsdale College curriculum that has been approved for use in Idaho schools. She pointed out its right wing/anti-truth bias and why our diverse student population deserves a high quality curriculum based on facts and historical reality rather than political and religious ideology.
Those of us who care about truth and democracy could take a page from her book: Pay attention. Do something. Another opportunity for action on behalf of democracy presents itself as Republicans in the Legislature work to take precious taxpayer dollars from public schools and give them to private and religious schools. Say something. Do something.
Alice Jacobson
Lewiston
No George Washington
Trump groupies are now calling Donald Trump “the second George Washington.” But the demon dumpster no more resembles Washington than a gold ingot resembles a stinking turd.
Tom Nichols writes in The Atlantic that Trump is the tyrant that George Washington feared: “Trump and his authoritarian political movement represent an existential threat to every ideal that Washington cherished and encouraged in his new nation. They are the incarnation of Washington’s misgivings about populism, partisanship, and the spirit of revenge that Washington lamented as the animating forces of party politics.”
Washington also feared that in the midst of constant political warfare some citizens would come to seek “security and repose in the absolute power of an individual,” and that eventually a demagogue would exploit that sentiment. Voila: Enter Donald, the demon dumpster.
Nichols also says no other president in history, even the worst moral scoundrels among them, is more the antithesis of George Washington than Trump.
Yet somehow Washington’s nightmare has convinced his millions of brainwashed minions that he should rule this country with the undisputed right to do whatever he wants with it? Holy buffalo chips, skatman. Gadzooks.
George Washington would never have given control of this country to a hateful, lying, misogynistic, xenophobic, narcissistic, racist criminal grifter, and a treasonous despot, to boot.
But the American people have.
Mike Epstein
Clarkston
