There is a columnist in our local, middle of the road, mainstream suburban newspaper (actually distribution in the hundreds of thousands) whom I have always considered open minded and fair. He is a very well respected columninst with a distinguished career that included stints major urban newspapers.
Sunday he came out with a column just blistering shrub on almost all fronts from the RW media bias and choreographed press conferences to his refusal to meet with religious leaders before the war, the economy and of course the war itself ending by asking the question if the American people are finally grasping the magnitude of this multiple disaster.
So, yesterday I sent him an email thanking him, here is what I said:
Dear Mr. XXXXXXX,
I am writing this in response to your column of 8/31/03 to let you know that you are right on it. I am writing to you because I feel the you are "fair and balanced" and have an open mind, unlike much of the mainstream media. I wrote to you and XXXXX before the war began to try to point out that the war was planned long before 9/11 by the neo-cons in the PNAC who have hijacked our foreign policy. I had been an independent voter, never aligning with one side or the other and often voting third party but this administration has just gone way to far for me to sit on my hands anymore. I have recently discovered the website democraticunderground.com and am writing to urge you to check it out. Yes, it is a liberal website and the views are slanted towards the left, but it is also a wonderful fount of knowledge. Posters to their forum are blasted when they do not support their arguments with facts and sources and there are some extremely intelligent and eloquent members. Yes, there are some kooks as well, but they can be ignored. I don't know if you have ever heard of the writer William Rivers Pitt, he is the author of three books and has his own website at truthout.org. He is a frequent poster on DU and writes some marvelous essays. He is a talented wordsmith and I urge you to look at some of his essays, Here are a couple of links.
http://truthout.org/docs_03/082903A.shtml
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=246482
Again, I thank you for your article. Please check out the democratic underground and Mr. Pitt. If you are impressed with what you see, please pass along to Burt and others that may want to utilize these great information sources.
Sincerely,...Ok, so I got a return email from him thanking me, and saying that he would put DU on his favorites list!!
I asked if I could post what he wrote and he said he'd rather not, it was a personal email and his column does require some objectivity. So, sir, if you are reading this I apologize and hope that I have been properly anonymous with your name but I just could not keep this from my fellow DUers/ Keep up the good work.
on edit: second link was a broke dupe of the first DU link, now removed
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