Letters: 1 - 7 Oct 2008

Letters from Irish Voice readers

Letters: 1 - 7 Oct 2008

October 1, 2008

To Heck With the World

WITH all due respect to the armchair warrior Cormac MacConnell regarding his piece on Sarah Palin, and why we Americans should vote for Barack Obama because that is what he and the world want, I have just one thing to say.

Who cares what the rest of the world wants regarding our choice of president! We will pick who we want, not who the rest of the world wants. What cheek! Worry about your own leaders!

Obama is a fraud with zero experience who has some really radical friends and even more radical ideas. Didn’t they say that when the devil comes, he won’t be coming in a red cape with horns and a tail?

No! He will come clothed as a handsome, articulate, mysterious stranger. Sounds like someone we know on the campaign trail, and it isn’t John McCain!

Go Sarah! Go John!

J. Cahill
Boonton, New Jersey

McCain Out of Step

IT is no surprise that John McCain feels comfortable among the Irish crowd because they are a forgiving bunch.

Let’s take the interview he gave last year on NPR while talking about Iraq and the surge, etc. He had the raw nerve to declare that without British troops in the north of Ireland there would be no peace today!

If you agree that the last 30 years has been about a foreign occupation and its reaction, then yes, McCain has been out of step with the Irish on the issue of peace in Ireland, including his attempt to block the Gerry Adams visa.

My last point is to all those who would deprive Cormac MacConnell’s right to disagree with Sarah Palin. I myself have sometimes pulled my hair out reading John Spain, but the point is that this is the Irish Voice and everyone gets heard!

Thank you. I enjoy the read every week,

Niall O’Rourke
Forest Hills, New York

Mormons Baptizing??!?

JUST when you think you have seen and heard everything the “Ireland’s Eye” column strikes again. “Mormons Baptizing (Dead) Catholics” (September 10-16) was over the top.

How dare those brash Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints take it upon themselves to resolve an apparent shortcoming in the Catholic religion which precludes its souls from uniting in the after life? First, how did this shortcoming escape the founders of the church, and secondly how do the Mormons know that dead Catholics want to be baptized into the Church of Latter Day Saints? How do they know they want to be reunited?

Let’s do a for instance. A Protestant widower converts to Catholicism knowing that because of this he will never have to be with his deceased wife who had made his life miserable for 40 years. He dies happy knowing he will never, ever, never be reunited with her because of his conversion.

Along comes the well-meaning Mormons who posthumously baptize him into the Church of Jesus Christ and Latter Day Saints! All of a sudden he is reunited with the witch to which he has taken specific steps to never see again. And you thought we would all be better off without lawyers!

Are you sure this is not a joke?

Jerry Hoosier
Orange, California

GOP Supporters Stupid

CAN any responsible, clear thinking person really want John McCain to be our president for the next four or possibly eight years?

It boggles my mind why anyone, whether Irish American or other, would even entertain the thought of this man being our leader.

Let me begin by stating emphatically that this man is a phony and a liar, and his presidential campaign so far has been vile and as bad as the last couple of campaigns from the same republican despots.

Ciaran Staunton of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform, et al, seemingly fell for McCain’s charm while he smiled and hoodwinked the obviously ill-informed people of Scranton at the Irish Presidential Form last week.

McCain has a great knack of feigning interest as he did in Washington, D.C. when ILIR first went down there en masse a couple of years ago. I remember thinking then that he was a phony, and I am proved right almost on a daily basis regarding that thought when I listen to him now.

He has adopted and enhanced the vile tactics of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney and all the other really terrible people who have contributed to the very frightening mess that we are all in at this moment.

Of course the above mentioned will always have their fat cat friends to fall back on, whether they be Halliburton, Carlyle, Exxon, or pick a drug company connection. You can be sure that they will never be in danger of struggling or paying taxes the way middle America will have to for the foreseeable future.

McCain, let there be no doubt about it, is a George W. Bush man, and that alone should disqualify him from becoming the leader of this fine country and indeed the de facto leader of the world. Simply put, anyone who votes Republican is stupid.

I don’t even want to brooch the subject of the evangelical, clueless hockey mom, creationist pit bull in a skirt who could be, potentially, a heartbeat away from the highest job in the land as the Irish Voice would have to allow me a few more pages to vent. So enough about her, and with a bit of luck she will just fade into the background and never be heard from again.

Let me reiterate — McCain is a huge step backwards, and by that I mean everything bad. Any guy who overly uses his imprisonment in Vietnam for political purposes is liable to stop at nothing to achieve his greedy and warped ideological goals.

He is not unlike Rudy Giuliani, who has made a lot of bread out of the 9/11 tragedy and who is as low class as they come. Unfortunately we had to be reminded of him again when he made his sneering and humorless appearance at the GOP war convention and, quite frankly, made a fool of himself yet again.

Seriously, my fellow Irish and American friends, we have one last chance to right this ship that is sinking as a result of eight years of cynicism, lies and dishonesty. Although originally and admittedly a Hillary Clinton, stalwart I have to say now that Barack Obama is potentially that visionary that we had wished for.

Without doubt he is smart, energetic and I would feel proud to see him and Michelle represent us on the world stage. Do not let McCain’s bygone war stories and lies distort the truth.

Also, do not let race become a factor. Any Irish person who says that he won’t vote for Obama because he is black can only pick up a history of Ireland, and you will find that his story is not unlike that of the Irish all throughout our history.

I personally want to get behind an energetic person who will not cave into the special interests and will tackle global warming, which will be the major thing that we face in the coming years. I want to see a visionary who will invest billions in clean energy bio-fuels, and not some ridiculous war in Iraq which we have lost, surge or no surge.

Let’s take back this country and let it prosper, if not for us at least for our children and their children. Let the evangelical NASCAR rednecks vote their way, but to others I say, kindly, use some common sense when you visit the polls in a couple of weeks and vote for Obama.

Dessie Coogan
Astoria, New York

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