I noted with some amusement, but also a touch of sadness, the letter in your July 3 edition from Mr. Robert W. Kuehnl requesting that the Cape Gazette employ a conservative columnist to counter some of the views of your Mr. Don Flood.

Mr. Kuehnl’s mentions in his letter a few of the subjects that Mr. Flood has covered and then complains that, over the past two years he has lived in Lewes, he has not read anything about the IRS ‘scandal,' the VA ‘scandal,' Benghazi ‘whitewashing,’ foreign policy with respect to Ukraine, Iraq, and the Middle East; AP wiretaps; Fast & Furious; the trading of a marine from Afghanistan, but not out of Mexico; ‘dumping’ illegal immigrants around the country; and then finally his ‘big one’ - Obamacare.  Clearly Mr. Kuenhl has already made his mind up about all these subjects in view of the ways he describes them and just as clearly he gets his main feed of news from the Fox News TV channel whose favorite modus operandi is attacking our president for anything and everything he does, whether he is at fault or not. There are plenty of sources outside the Cape Gazette for Mr. Kuehnl to have discovered the true facts about these issues but for him it seems Fox trumps all other sources.

I would suggest that if Mr. Kuehnl wants to hear about those special Fox News items he should restrict himself to watching the TV.

Unfortunately,  “good conservative” reporters are hard to come by these days because nearly all those with right-leaning tendencies now seem to be inhabiting the (whacky) far right alongside the likes of Ted Cruz and Michelle Bachmann. The Republican Party with which I identified myself in the 1970s and 1980s is no longer.  It has morphed into a hateful, polarizing entity run by very rich people who employ the best propagandists that money can buy, and the result is an electorate that has also become polarized.

If America really wants its citizens to enjoy a high standard of living, I would recommend to you an article I read recently in The Spokesman-Review.  From 1920 to 2009 (80 years) each political party inhabited the White House for 40 years. Investing $100,000 in a 401(k) in only the Republican Presidential years you end up with $129,000.  That same $100,000 invested in only the Democratic presidential years you end up with $3.9 million. If you include the Obama years that $3.9 million increases significantly. The columnist also pointed out that the deficit was 10 percent of GDP ($1.2 trillion) when Bush II left office, and is now only 3 percent of GDP ($500 billion.) Those are all facts.  Unfortunately, today too many people are uninterested in facts, preferring to keep their pre-conceived notions or ‘popular’ misconceptions of the facts fed to them by others.

Richard Freeman
Milford