THURSDAY'S LETTERS: Kornheiser Dishes But Can't Take, More on Waterbury Paper's 'Red' Ned Editorial

By: E&P Staff In today's letters, readers respond to Greg Mitchell's recent column on a Waterbury paper's branding of Ned Lamont as a socialist, and another reader thinks the Washington Post's Tony Kornheiser has thin skin.


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Waterbury Paper and 'Red' Ned Lamont

I was really shocked to find out all this about Ned Lamont. I met Corliss [Lamont] at his big house in Ossining, N.Y., in the early 90's. My mom took me. It was for an annual benefit for peace that he would give. My mom knew him well . When I was a child in the 60's someone spray painted a big yellow ( not red ) line down our driveway and wrote "pinko commie" too. Let's hope they do not do that on Ned's driveway.

Michael Urbain



[Greg Mitchell's] point is well-enough taken, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough. This morning's "Non Sequitor" cartoon suggests that Justice Antonin Scalia is a supporter of the enslavement of African-Americans, a fairly conventional slur. Unlike cold war-era accusations of communist sympathies, this is a live, hate-mongering charge in real time. Accusations of fascism, racism, resemblances to Hitler, etc. are the very air that journalists on the Left breathe. Those journalists who profess that their standards are more important than their political ideology seldom call out this sort of thing. One result is that false, incendiary accusations of racist motive (such as in the recent charges of rape made against some Duke students, and abetted most notoriously by NEWSWEEK) are among the most powerfully divisive factors in American politics today, and account for a great deal of generic popular antipathy toward the term "liberal."

I have yet to see your column address the kind of left-wing trash talk I mention above, though like (apparently) most people who go into the "mandarin" professions, you and your site are extremely sensitive to trash talk from the Right. As long as your mind stays in that conventional box (i.e., only conservatives are motivated by hatred and bigotry), you will have difficulty, as do many other interpreters of American politics, in understanding just why there is so little 'outrage' at the latter. After having heard the Republicans described as interchangeable with concentration camp guards and Ku Klux Klansman, the average reader is not going to get in a lather about a Democrat being described as a far-left sympathizer, even if 'non-partisan' media persons do so.

Mark Richard


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Kornheiser Dishes It, But He Can't Take It

Good story on the review of Kornheiser?s work. I?m a fan of Kornheiser?s writing and his TV and radio work. And I once was a sports editor -- Fort Worth Star-Telegram in the early ?90s.

I love sports writers but at the risk of painting with too broad a brush I have to say that they are extremely thin skinned. As the cliche goes, they can dish it out but they don?t like to take it.

I thought Kornheiser was above that. Evidently not.

Mike Perry
Editor & Publisher
CorpusBeat Magazine