As to link, find it yourself.
No, you made the claim, you find it, or I will have to accept you're a fukking liar!
I am referring to an editorial in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer the fact that after the event, "hundreds" of anti-McDermott were received, while "dozens" of pro-McDermott letters were received.
Oh, really.........not in this lifetime!
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archives.seattletimes.nwsource.com
The Seattle Times
Northwest Life: Thursday, October 03, 2002
Erik Lacitis / Times staff columnist
Let hawks screech; many back McDermott
Yesterday morning I stopped by to talk to Jane Sanders and told her not to spin me, because for sure, this column is a no-spin zone, fair and balanced. At least, kind of.
She was sitting in Jim McDermott's local office on the 12th floor of the Tower Building in downtown Seattle. He's our congressman representing the Seventh District, which is pretty much all of Seattle and Vashon Island. And, sure, we're a bunch of liberals here in Seattle, but his district also includes plenty of conservative-type bastions, mostly the rich homes with the views of Lake Washington and Puget Sound, and I wouldn't say that the towns of SeaTac or Shoreline are exactly peacenik havens.
So here was Jane, district director for McDermott, sitting at one of those big conference tables and looking a bit overwhelmed. In front of her were faxes, letters, e-mails and phone messages. At one end of the table was Toni Lysen, a staff assistant, who kept picking up the phone as the constituent calls came in.
As you may have heard from the cable-TV talk shows and the harrumphing op-ed writers, we have a representative who has sided with the enemy, or at least given the Republicans plenty of ammo to challenge the patriotism of Democrats.
I told Jane, again, that we had entered a no-spin zone, so no pre-selecting responses about McDermott's trip to Iraq.
Actually, Jane let me grab handfuls of paper to be photocopied. She also let me look as the faxes kept coming in.
I asked Jane about her background, just to make sure she wasn't some Hanoi Jane-type. She's 63, a historian, married to a guy named Jim who served in Vietnam as a helicopter doorgunner. Until the office got flooded with Iraq stuff, Jane spent her days dealing with elderly people having problems with Medicare, and vets who got put on long waiting lists because the VA hospital has had budget cutbacks. Well, OK.
Here was a fax that came in from "Scott" in area code 408, the Los Gatos, Calif., area. He creatively titled it, "Coward," and went on, "You should be ashamed for going to Iraq to undermine the safety of the American People. You and your Party created 9/11."
And here was another out-of-town fax, calling him a traitor, and saying he should "rot in hell."
But then I started looking at stacks of unfiltered responses from McDermott's constituents, and it turned out they haven't been swayed by the blowhards on the cable talk show nor the harrumphing op-ed writers.
"Thank you for promoting peace."
"We need a dissenting voice."
"Trent Lott says on national TV that you should keep your mouth shut. Thank God you do not."
"I truly appreciate what you're doing to slow this down to a thoughtful pace."
I asked Jane for some numbers on the responses. The best she could do was guess at them. Six-hundred phone calls a day. Some 50 letters, maybe the same amount of faxes.
At his Washington, D.C., office, McDermott's gotten some 1,400 e-mails about Iraq. The office tried to set it up so the system only allows constituent e-mails to get through, because that's their priority. But of those 1,400 e-mails, 400 were from other parts of the country. The constituents who got through appear to be 75 percent to 80 percent in support of him. It was the nonlocals who kept calling him a traitor.
I asked Jane Sanders why she thought all these Seattle people were behind their congressman, and she said that, well, they understood he was trying to do his best to prevent a war.
McDermott's background includes a stint in the Navy as a chief psychiatrist during the Vietnam War, and so he saw plenty of the consequences of going to war.
I doubt that McDermott's trip to Iraq is going to put Seattle on any federal-grant money list from the Bush administration. Even McDermott acknowledged that he could have chosen his words more carefully about Bush.
Out here in the Pacific Northwest, I guess we've decided we would rather have this guy Jim McDermott who goes off on a trip for peace, even if he gets lambasted on Fox News, than Trent Lott.
That's why we're Seattle, bless our individualistic souls.
Erik Lacitis: 206-464-2237 or elacitis@seattletimes.com.
Copyright © 2002 The Seattle Times Company |
