Nice try, Brien . . .

Brien Martin is a demagogue and a crummy historian to boot. He wails with outrage that people have the temerity to disagree with Congressman Ramstad – or him, for that matter –in a letter printed in the Edina Sun Current on September 15th. His tut tutting over the recent Edina town hall meeting with the Congressman is laughable.

The Congressman, like most seasoned politicians, is practiced at the art of deflecting questions and of providing non-answers. He was in fine form at the forum Martin mentions. Unlike the preening boobs in the White House Press Corps, however, the attendees weren’t willing to accept the codswallop that Ramstad served up. He was so relentlessly non-committal on the subject of Social Security “reform” that he wouldn’t even engage the audience in a discussion of different proposals or options.

Martin has it exactly backwards. It was Ramstad that didn’t want to engage in a discussion, not the crowd. People only got restive after being stone-walled for most of the hour. Speaking of that, the attendees were first treated to a twenty or twenty-five minute monologue, and then the Congressman made long, rambling responses to questions in an obvious attempt to run out the clock. Kind of like Condoleeza Rice before the 9/11 commission.

The capper was when Ramstad tried to connect 9/11 with the war in Iraq, a notion that is has been so thoroughly discredited that many people were insulted, justifiably so. Here’s Martin’s defense of Ramstad in his letter criticizing an earlier letter by Penny Van Kampen:

As for Penny Van Kampen, who later wrote (Aug. 25) that at the meeting Ramstad was exploiting 9/11, I would like to know if she also believes President Franklin Roosevelt exploited Pearl Harbor? After all Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor, not Germany and so Roosevelt taking the country to war with Germany, according to Van Kampen's logic, must have been illegal and deceptive. With her logic then I suppose President Abraham Lincoln exploited Gettysburg, too?

What a bonehead. Van Kampen replies this week in the Sun Current:

Mr. Brien Martin, vice chairman of the Senate District 41 Republican Executive Committee, is mistaken. I do not think that attacking Germany in 1941 was "illegal or deceptive." His hypothetical of my "logic" has a problem; the facts get in the way. Germany and Japan had been allies since 1940. Prior to Pearl Harbor, the United States had already attacked German submarines. Moreover, Germany declared war on the United States four days after Pearl Harbor.

Brien, liberals are “close-minded and intolerant?” Hysterical laughter. Sorry.

Spot has written a little more about the meeting on his other blog, here.

Tags: Jim Ramstad Brien Martin