Mash Notes, Hate Mail & Other Correspondence

Dear Editor: This week, a memo from the Veterans Administration (VA) indicated that it plans to cut 83,000 employees to comply with Mr. Trump’s orders to slash the federal government. (Military.com) These cuts are on top of the few thousand VA jobs already cut, along with hundreds of contracts that support veterans’ health care. These cuts will have devastating effects on thousands of New Hampshire veterans who rely on the VA for their health care, including members of the local chapter of the Disabled American Veterans. In addition, about 25 percent of the VA workforce are veterans, many who have already lost their jobs. These …

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To the Editor: Merriam Webster defines stupidity as acts “lacking intelligence or reason.” A corollary is that stupid decisions reflect a lack of understanding of their consequences. Given these propositions, the torrent of ill-conceived, consistently incompetent, and sometimes illegal appointments, policies and directives emanating from the Trump White House can best be described as a firehose of stupidity. Trump’s recent decisions lack intelligence and demonstrate little understanding of their possible consequences. Trump’s imposition of a 25 percent tariff on a broad range of Canadian and Mexican goods makes little sense even considering their thirty-day suspension. Even the Wall Street Journal has called the policy “The …

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Dear Editor, Stunning, isn’t it? Watching them all fall in line, like dominoes, the spineless, the fearful, the greedy, the ignorant, the stupid, the fascist? Eight years ago, there was some semblance of institutional resistance to the Criminal Dictator. This time around, complicity in dismantling the democracy is in full swing. In lockstep with the 77+ million who stupidly believe this idiot is the savior, Time Magazine, The Washington Post, the LA Times, the odious Silicon Valley tech bros, the cult captives in both houses of Congress, all of them can’t plant their lips on his backside fast enough, tongues hanging out, shoveling millions and …

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To the Editor: Donald Trump convincingly won the 2024 election by adding a substantial number of Black and Hispanic voters to his MAGA base. Polls indicate that these voters cast their ballot on pocketbook issues, believing that Trump was better suited to managing the economy than Harris. The mystery is how did a large segment of the working-class come to accept that an inept, arrogant plutocrat would manage the economy in their interest? To understand the issue, we need to go beyond the discussion of campaign strategies or individual characteristics to an analysis of the four-decade-long influence of the economic ideology known as neoliberalism. Neoliberalism …

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