McConnell missed the target
Re: “Withdrawing from Syria is a grave mistake by the U.S.,” Oct. 19 guest commentary
Great to see Sen. Mitch McConnell emerge from his shell to condemn former President Barack Obama, Sen. Chuck Schumer and all of the Democrat presidential hopefuls for President Donald Trump’s decision to abruptly “cut and run” from Syria. It is cold blooded to avoid direct criticism of the commander in chief, but was done in a clever reptilian manner.
Michael Thomas, Pueblo
Just reading the title of the commentary, and the article itself, by Mitch McConnell, tells how far this Republican will go to protect an inept and corrupt president and keep his own self-serving position.
The U.S is not responsible for pulling our military support abruptly from the Kurds in Syria. President Donald Trump, the commander in chief, is the one responsible.
We need to also recognize the other politicians who stood by Trump’s shameful action, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Vice President Mike Pence and all the Republicans who have found ways to again twist the president’s dangerous words and actions. McConnell should be ashamed of writing such a piece without putting the name of the major instigator of this horrific betrayal foremost in his commentary.
Linnea Wilkinson, Aurora
After almost three years of bad behavior by Donald Trump, he finally has done something the GOP finds so bad that it deserves condemnation: His precipitous and ill-informed abandonment of the Kurds in Syria. I won’t directly address this latest foreign policy misadventure except to agree that it was likely the worst thing Trump has done in the foreign policy arena.
And I won’t try to explain what motivated Mitch McConnell to write an op-ed in (of all places!) The Washington Post, Trump’s sworn enemy.
However, I have to say that I find much of what McConnell says to be repugnant: just more of the tired old Cold War rhetoric that led to so many misadventures. Then, we were fighting “the Communist threat,” as if it was some carefully orchestrated movement threatening the civilized world. It led us to blindly support dictators like Augusto Pinochet in Chile simply because he said he was against communism.
Today the common enemy is ISIS (or Daesh, as it is called in Arabic). I endorse much of what the USA did to counter ISIS, with one major exception: This should have been a NATO action, not a USA-alone action. I don’t think we tried hard enough to get NATO to invest in the fight. And the fight is far from over, notwithstanding the victory lap run by Trump.
It’s a terribly complicated situation, far beyond the ability of Donald Trump to understand. “Not my problem,” he says. But it is our problem because ISIS is everyone’s problem. However, the answer is not the standard GOP answer to foreign policy, which gets the USA involved in the affairs of other countries more than we should (the Cold War model).
James W. Craft, Broomfield
Save access to e-books
Re: “Newly released e-books could become scarce,” Oct. 15 guest commentary
I am an avid library user and e-book reader. I download digital media regularly from my library directly to my devices for free, sometimes several titles at a time — like a virtual bookshelf, all those titles stacked up on my digital nightstand.
Now, Macmillan Publishing is planning to restrict access to new releases of e-books in my library. This stunt not only puts access to digital media at risk, it puts democracy at risk as well.
Hyperbole? Perhaps. Truth? Certainly. Macmillan is trying to restrict access to books. This is not what libraries do. Libraries are about access for all, for free. Have you hit the “search” button on your library’s website to request “The Testaments” by Margaret Atwood only to see, “Your holds position: #587 on 80 copies.” Macmillan Publishing is about to make this worse. More than worse: untenable. Why? Macmillan aims to limit all libraries to one copy of each popular new release, for eight weeks. In Denver, that would mean 26 branches share a single e-book copy of the hot new release.
Judy Allender, Centennial