January 18, 2021
Dear editor;
How do you combat a Lie? With Facts and the Truth. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won the popular vote and the Electoral College Vote November 3, 2020.
President Donald Trump fraudulently denies their win with the big lie that he won the election by a landslide. He told his supporters over and over that he had won and that Biden was stealing it from him. He ginned up his followers to a fever pitch at his January 6 rally, then sent them to the Capitol to “take back their country”, even turning them on his vice president Mike Pence for whom they built a gallows to hang him. Five others died as a result of their insurrection.
After the insurrectionist siege, 135 Republicans, including top leaders in the House, Kevin McCarthy and Steve Scalise, still supported the lie to continue with objecting to confirming Biden’s election win. Only certain states were objected to, those whose black population in particular led to Biden’s victory even though the rest of the ballot had Republican winners for the House and Senate.
Incitement of Insurrection is the title of Trump’s second impeachment. The Senate must indict the president and keep him from running for office again. Trump must be held accountable after the traitorous onslaught he created at the Capitol, for Lord only knows what future carnage he envisions to completely destroy our democracy.
Unity without accountability just continues our reluctance to face the truth. Trump from the start took Steve Bannon’s advice to “deconstruct the administrative state”, that Trump calls the Deep State or Swamp. Trump delighted in reversing every good thing that Barack Obama did and led us miserably into the deepest pits of COVID-19 and wrecked our economy in the process. Stock Market highs do not equal a good economy.
We have a chance with president Biden to climb out of this abyss, but each of us has to stand up and do the right thing. Edward R. Murrow said many years ago, “A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves.”
May 10, 1967, Martin Luther King, Jr. declared there were three evils: Racism, poverty, and war, saying, “We must face the hard fact that many Americans would like to have a nation which is a democracy for white Americans but simultaneously a dictatorship over black Americans.” I pray now is the time we find common ground to work together.
Judy Siedlecki, Oswego