Letters to the Editor 6/24

Sen. John Ensign's affair is a public matter

Contrary to what many seem to be saying, the Sen. John Ensign affair is not private.

Remember when presidential hopeful Gary Hart challenged the press to follow him as his response to their questions about affairs?

They did and got some lovely photos of Hart with his girlfriend on the yacht "Risky Business." When Ensign ran as a Christian conservative and member of Promise Keepers he was selling his moral purity. That makes his affair public. His affair with his campaign aid (with a generous raise) betrayed his trust with campaign donors.

With his paramour's husband working on his staff and assistance he gave the husband was misuse of public money. This whole tacky affair has a stench about it and all of the parties involved. Character always matters. If it was an affair of someone who did not campaign on moral superiority and did not involve campaign contributions or public money I would agree that it was not a public matter.

Unless that person was planning on running for president! Then it all matters.

RONALD ADAMS

Dayton

Obama changing U.S. back to pre-Sept. 11

The Wall Street Journal has said that if Sept. 11, 2001, was the day everything changed, Nov. 4, 2008, was the day everything changed back. Bush protected America from terror. Now Obama is protecting the terrorists from America.

President un-Bush is dismantling the defenses of what used to be the United States and reducing us to a sort of generic Belgium to punish us for our "arrogance".

This policy puts us at risk of another 9/11, so waterboarding-the-issue was invented to provide Obama a convenient way to blame the next attack on the last administration.

Please. Democrats have yet to outlaw waterboarding, and does anyone believe the Chappaquiddick party that fake drowning is torture? The steady stream of pre-waterboarding Clinton era terror bombings stopped when Bush treated 9/11 as an act of war. Bush wasn't just lucky the last eight years.

Appeasing, apologizing, emasculating the CIA, defunding the military, leaking the identities of CIA interrogators, shafting allies like Israel, and incarcerating jihadi recruiters in American prisons are real terrorist recruiting tools.

Remember the images of people jumping from the twin towers with their clothes on fire? Noncombatant Americans by the thousands will soon face the same or worse for Obama's ideological vanity.

LYNN MUZZY

Minden