Letters to the editor – 1/28/15

Rail debacle

John Pritchett nailed it in his column showing Mayor Caldwell holding a sign that says “Rail Tax Forever” while an unseen someone asks, “What happened to on time and on budget?'”

It seems we’ve gotten into the local version of Boston’s “Big Dig” that nearly bankrupted that big city. What have our leaders gotten us into?

Linda Ching
Honolulu

Deserves MOH

I think of Bob Jones as a pretty liberal commentator, but I was pleased to see his column “Stating The Case For A Medal Of Honor.” I’ve read the descriptions of what MOH recipients did to earn their medals, and I believe the action of Maj. John Duffy, as described by Mr Jones, meet that criteria. I hope those in a position of power will agree.

Gary Murata
Honolulu

A good way to go

What a powerful comment Don Chapman made in writing about his late golf buddies Gus Hannemann and Henry Loui, saying they couldn’t be more different “ethnically, generationally, professionally, religiously,” yet always had a good time together.

If there were more of that in the world, well, it would be a much different world.

Thomas Lee
Honolulu

Lives matter

Great question posed by Patrick Buchanan in his column “Willing To Die For Charlie Hebdo?”

Mr. Buchanan is right, Islamists are more willing to die for their cause than most Westerners are.

Another way of looking at it: We have more to live for.

Steve Wilson
Honolulu

Why they hate us

Someone simply must respond to Susan Page’s column “Why Do They Hate Us? They Just Do.”

If her mother really had the 1970s-era brilliance ascribed to her by her daughter, she may have had in mind Israel’s preemptive 1967 war on its Arab-nation neighbors and the illegal settlement program initiated by its Zionist leaders immediately thereafter to steal land, dunam by dunam, from the indigenous Palestinian people trying to hang on to the West Bank-Gaza Strip rump of (the British/UN Mandate) Palestine.

If her mother’s brilliance and self-education extended that far into the then-recent past, Ms. Page may even have reflected that the illegal U.N. partition of the Holy Land in November 1947, stoutly opposed by the brilliant and prescient likes of our George C. Marshall and almost all of D.C.’s foreign-policy experts, was a looming disaster from its outset:

European Zionist Jews’ invasion of Palestine was a sure prescription for decades-long Middle East turmoil, the loss to our American treasury of too many trillions of dollars, and the unjustifiable loss of too many U.S. military personnel fighting too many catastrophically bad wars in the Middle Eastern sphere at the insidious or overt bidding of assorted Israel-first Zionists and neoconservatives.

Robert H. Stiver
Pearl City