Parker’s gratuitous attack

Kathleen Parker’s “Dear Mr. Trump” (Dec. 26) is horribly blighted with petulance and vitriol. Her point of view is not fitting, reliable, or objective.

She relies on facetious naivete by alluding to President-elect Trump’s offhand remark about spending half of his presidency in New York. Did she really take him seriously? None of this has anything to do with the man’s ability to run the country.

She cites her grandmother’s ability to discern between truth and “b.s. " (Parker’s crudity) as proof that President-elect Trump is lying. Surely she should have a better fact checker than that!

Third, she uses the past tense four times to defame President-elect Trump’s campaign promises: "I knew you would not do most of what you promised. So (your) anger was a ruse. The promises were slogans. The nasty rhetoric was juice for the base.” Obviously Kathleen Parker has become clairvoyant, for she knows future events while Mr. Trump is a month from taking office!

Fourth, Parker cites three ISIS-condoned atrocities and excoriates President-elect Trump for declaring them as part of radical Islam. How sad that all evidence and the terrorists’ dying words apparently mean nothing to Kathleen Parker.

Political correctness gone sour, gentlemen and ladies, leads to outright chaos in a civilized society.

Finally, she ends her factless diatribe with the catch-all “blame the Republicans” excuse tor all of the Obama administration failures, presenting not one substantive solution for the country’s myriad troubles. She complains, blames, and declares herself correct.

After the 2012 election, your board advised Republicans to relax, to accept defeat with grace, and to look forward to Christmas with hope and change on the horizon. Now you and Kathleen are asked to take that same advice.

Gee … thanks

On Dec. 28, Sprint announced it was “creating” 5,000 jobs in America. The company stated these jobs “will support a variety of functions across the organization including Customer Care and Sales teams” and that they were “excited to work with President-elect Trump and his administration to do our part to drive economic growth and create jobs in America.” God bless you, Sprint!

For his part, Trump told reporters that same day while vacationing at Mar-a-Lago that Sprint was bringing back jobs to the U.S. because of “what is happening and the spirit and the hope” from his election, adding, “because of me they are doing 5,000 jobs in this country.” God bless you, Donald Trump!

God forbid we assume this is just another Trump scam like the Carrier bait-and-switch where he saved (some) jobs and left the Indiana taxpayer to pay the $7 million tax bill. Nor should we skeptically assume these are the same “Customer Care and Sales teams” jobs Sprint announced in April 2015, the low-paying temporary jobs to replace millions of recalled phones because it was cheaper than importing Hindus from India to hand-deliver replacement phones in the U.S.

Lest we forget, we should also give a heartfelt thank you to Sprint for moving its vast U.S. operations overseas and then having the audacity to wave the American flag in our faces while giving us back table scraps.

Not pretty

Republicans incredibly relinquished control of their pants and gravity took over. They showed their butts, they showed their true selves. Then, when they figured out (Duh!) that nobody would approve of their plans to remove themselves from independent ethical oversight, and with a thump back onto the road by President-elect Trump, they abandoned their plans.

But the fact remains that they did indeed plan to do it. What could they possibly have been thinking — giddily, that they can now do whatever they want? "Let's ride roughshod over the nation for the next two years! Let's see them try to stop us!"

That's the only reasonable interpretation. Yes, they stopped themselves and changed course, but not until after the pants-drop. Too late. You can't un-ring a bell. You can't recall a speeding bullet. You can say we didn't really mean it, but if that were true, then why would you go there in the first place?

Republicans have placed themselves in a position where the nation must depend on them to do the right thing for us. And the first action they take is to show that any trust they might have earned would be foolishly misplaced.

Pure distortion

Shame on you for reprinting Phillip Rucker's misleading article titled "Trump tweets praise of Putin for attack on Clinton" without a disclaimer.

Nowhere in this article, if you bothered to read it, does it mention anything Putin said about Clinton. nor, does it even mention Clinton at all. So what was the purpose of the "fake news" headline?

I suspect it was an intentional attempt to rile and inflame the emotions of the anti-Trump crowd who are content only in developing their opinions based on headlines. With respect for the media at an all-time low because of this kind of misinformation, is it any wonder your industry is circling the drain? How I miss Walter Cronkite.

This story was originally published January 5, 2017 at 12:25 PM with the headline "Parker’s gratuitous attack."