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Show A5 The Emery County Review, Tuesday, October 28, 2008 VIEWPOINT Opinion and Letters to the Editor Editor’s View Vote to Cure Crisis in Leadership Established January 2, 2007 James L. Davis, Publisher & Editor w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w w Colleen A. Davis, Co-Publisher, Office & Advertising Manager Josie Luke, Assistant Editor Lyndsay Reid, Advertising Design Paige Motte, Advertising Sales Kathy P. Ockey, Staff Journalist Casey Wood, Webmaster Our Vision To be a valued member of the communities we serve and to be trusted as an honest, truthful and reliable source of news. w w w Our Mission To inform, entertain and provide a public forum for the discussion of events impacting the people of the Emery County area and to inform with news and features relevant to those who call the Castle Valley area home w w w Our Principles We will be ethical in all of our efforts to provide information to the public. We will be unbiased in our reporting and will report the facts as we see them and do our best to focus on the good news of the county, its people, history and way of life. We will be strong and active members of the community and assist in any way that we are able. We will strive to provide the best quality product possible to our readers and advertisers...always. We will verify the details of news we are reporting and if a mistake is made on our part we will correct it immediately. We will always listen to suggestions on how to do our job better. James L. Davis Election Day is almost, mercifully here. We will all have the opportunity to let our voices be heard as we elect our leaders not only nationally, but locally as well. Even as we do so, the fact remains that as a nation we have very little confidence in not only our elected officials, but in all of our leaders. It is being called a “Crisis in Confidence” by the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Merriman River Group, which conducted a survey on the subject which it published earlier this month as the National Leadership Index 2008. Key results of the survey found that “Confidence in the leaders of seven sectors – business, the Executive Branch, Congress, religion, education, the Supreme Court, and state govern- ment – fell more sharply in the past year than ever before.” The only poll showing less approval than President Bush is the approval rating of Congress, which in some polls is in the low teens. As a nation we are in search of leaders not only for the nation, but at the state and local level as well, and it is a search that for many ends only in frustration. The public leadership survey findings revealed that 80 percent of Americans believe that the U.S. faces a leadership crisis. Yet we continue, for the most part, to reelect the same leaders to serve us. Perhaps the cause of our crisis in leadership is what we expect from our leaders. As a nation we have come to expect, to demand of our leaders that they take care of us first and “others” last. But those “others” are quite often other citizens of the United States. While as a whole we loathe members of Congress, we adore our own congressmen. The problem is the “other guy,” not “our guy.” Until we start electing our leaders to be leaders, not panderers to our every want and desire, we will continue to face a crisis in leadership. We should be looking for leaders at every level in government, in our jobs, and in our schools that are willing to stand up for what is right, regardless of the cost. Being a leader requires the resolve and the character to do what is right, even when everyone else thinks it is wrong. It requires courage, strength, confidence and humility. As long as we continue to elect leaders based on what we think they will do for us, not what they will do for the country, for the state or for the community, we will continue to have leaders that we can’t count on and have little faith in. was serving on the council at the time and served with Laurie. Laurie was an excellent council member and served her full term. She represented the city well and for the complete time that she was elected. Her term is a public record and anyone who is interested in the truth can have access to the city records just by requesting this information by calling 384-2350 and asking for a copy of the closing minutes for the last year that Laurie served. I was there and served with Laurie so what I’m saying is not a rumor, it is a fact, as are the minutes from the meetings. Readers’ Forum Rumor Control I am writing this letter to clarify a rumor that has been going around in the county for the past couple of weeks. The rumor involves Laurie Pitchforth, a current candidate for Emery County Commissioner and regards her tenure on the Ferron City Council. I would like to speak to this rumor. I - Jo Sansevero Ferron Editorial Submission Guidelines The Emery County Review welcomes and invites letters to the editor and guest opinion articles on public policy or current events. We welcome letters of thanks to individuals who have helped make our community a better place to live, work and play. The editorial staff reserves the right to edit all submissions for space constraints, clarity and errors in fact. Submissions must include author’s name and contact information. Contact information will not be published. Letter’s and opinion articles can be sent to jldavis@theemerycountyreview.com, mailed to The Emery County Review, P.O. Box 487, Orangeville, UT. 84537 or faxed to 435-748-2543. Media Double Standard? You Betcha Patrick J. Buchanan Perhaps the only institution in America whose approval rating is beneath that of Congress is the media. Both have won their reputations the hard way. They earned them. Consider the fawning indulgence shown insider Joe Biden with the dripping contempt visited on outsider Sarah Palin. Twice last weekend, Biden grimly warned at closed-door meetings that a great crisis is coming early in the term of President Obama: “Mark my words. It will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy. ... Remember I said it standing here if you don’t remember anything else I said … we’re gonna have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy.” A “generated crisis”? By whom? Moscow? Beijing? Teheran? This is an astonishing statement from a chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee who has access to the same intelligence as George Bush. Joe was warning of a crisis like the Berlin Wall of July 1961, where JFK called for a tripling of the draft and ordered a call-up of reserves, or the missile crisis where U.S. pilots like John McCain were minutes away from bombing nuclear missile sites in Cuba and killing the Russians manning them. Is Russia about to move on the Crimea? Is Israel about to launch air strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites? What is Joe talking about? If one assumes Joe is a serious man, we have a right to know. Instead, what we got was Obama’s airy dismissal of Joe’s words as a “rhetorical flourish” and a media -rather than demanding that Joe hold a press conference -- acting as Obama surrogates parroting the talking points that Joe was just saying that new presidents always face tests. Had John McCain made that hair-raising statement, he would have been accused of fear mongering about a new 9/11. The media would have run with the story rather than have smothered it. Contrasting McCain with his hero, Joe declared a few weeks back, “When the stock market crashed, Franklin D. Roosevelt got on the television and ... said, ‘Look, here’s what happened.’” Nice historical reference. Except when the market crashed in 1929, Hoover was president, and there was no television. Can one imagine what the press would have done to Sarah Palin had she exhibited such ignorance of history. Or Dan Quayle? Joe gets a pass because everybody likes Joe. Fine. But Joe also has a record of 36 years in the Senate. Has anyone ever asked Joe about his own and his party’s role in cutting off aid to South Vietnam, leading to the greatest strategic defeat in U.S. history and the Cambodian holocaust? Has anyone ever asked Joe about the role he and his party played in working to block Reagan’s deployment of Pershing missiles in Europe, and SDI, which Gorbachev concedes broke the Soviets and won the Cold War? In the most crucial vote he ever cast -- to give Bush a blank check for war in Iraq -- Joe concedes he got it wrong. Is Joe’s record of having been wrong on Vietnam, wrong in the Cold War, wrong on the Iraq War, less important than whether Sarah Palin tried to get fired a rogue-cop brother-in-law who Tasered her 10-year old nephew to “teach him a lesson”? “I’ve forgotten more about foreign policy than most of my colleagues know,” says Joe humbly. Given his record, it is understandable Joe has forgotten so much of it. Saturday, the New York Times did a takeout on Cindy McCain that delved back into her problem with prescription pills. Yet when Hillary’s campaign manager, Mark Penn, brought up Obama’s cocaine use on “Hardball,” he was savaged by folks for whom the Times is the gold standard. The people apparently had a “right to know” of Bush’s old DUI arrest a week before the 2000 election, but no right to know about how and when Obama was engaged in the criminal use of cocaine. The media cannot get enough of the “Saturday Night Live” impersonations of Palin as a bubblehead. News shows pick up the Tina Fey clips and run them and run them to the merriment of all. Can one imagine “Saturday Night Live” doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her “I’ve never been proud” of my country, this “just downright mean” America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent? “Saturday Night Live” would be facing hate crime charges. How do we know? When the New Yorker ran a cartoon of Michelle in an Angela-Davis afro with an AK-47 slung over her shoulder, New Yorker editors had to go on national television to swear they were not mocking Michelle, but the conservatives who have so caricatured Michelle and The Messiah. Is there a media double standard? You betcha. (Copyright 2008 Creators Syndicate Inc.) |