San Diego Columnist gets tough reply...

From the San Diego Union-Tribune's Letters to the Editor:

[Note: Caldwell is a strong Republican and Bush supporter who writes both editorials and articles for the SD Union-Tribune.]

Recent history shows molehill may be mountain

Robert J. Caldwell's Feb. 19 column, “Poisonous politics damage America's democracy,” jogged my memory of recent history.

I remember the press pursuit of a minor event in the very early 1970s. The press made a political mountain of what everyone, including the Nixon administration, knew to be a molehill.

I remember people saying that Watergate was merely an invention of an overzealous press.

I remember the press pursuit of another nothing revelation in the mid-1980s. The press went after that one when everyone, including the Reagan administration, knew it was nothing of import.

Possibly, history will tell us that a chief executive's private deal with a terrorist nation while conducting a secret war out of the White House was nothing at all.

I remember the press cooperating in the 1990s in the longest, most relentless, most expensive and most fruitless campaign against a sitting president in United States history.

I read in the Union-Tribune that former Rep. Randy Cunningham's “efforts to conceal his corruption began to unravel after the Union-Tribune published a Copley News Service story June 12 describing his sale of the Del Mar-area home for $1.675 million” (News, Feb. 18).

I remember a quote attributed to Thomas Jefferson to the effect that given a choice between a government and a newspaper, he would take the newspaper.

The seeming feeding frenzy by the press after what everyone knows to be a nothing story about a vice president's hunting accident rests on a long history that shows the press revealing important information that government officials wanted to keep hidden.

Of course, the vice president's hunting accident is nothing.

I thought the bungled burglary and the bungled hostage deal and the bungled sex and the bungled bribery were all nothing, too, until the press, in pursuit of a story, showed otherwise.

LEIF FEARN San Diego

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