Letter was off base

To the editor:
I would like to make a comment or two concerning a letter to the editor which appeared in The Commercial Review as written by CR reader Mr. Randy Harmon.
In that letter, Mr. Harmon attempts to draw a connection between President Obama and Saul Alinsky.
Alinsky was a Leftist student and later a teacher at the University of Chicago. He died in 1972 when President Obama was a 10-year-old boy.
Not long before his death, Alinsky wrote a book titled “Rules for Radicals”. Mr. Harmon suggests in his letter that President Obama used “eight rules” in order to create a “social state”, and Harmon’s letter to the editor quotes the “eight rules.”
The so-called “eight rules,” however, were not a part of Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”; in fact, it is uncertain who wrote the “rules” and when they appeared.
Versions of the “eight rules” have been circulating on the Internet for a long period of time, the latest in January of 2014.
But they go all the way back to the time between the two world wars.
In that time period, a similar set of rules supposedly appeared in a Communist plot to overthrow America. The effort was titles, “Communist Rules for Revolution,” and even though it has been around for decades, who wrote it is unknown.
In “Rules for Radicals”, Alinsky did include a 13-point plan to use in what he called “power politics,” , but these are much different form the “eight rules” Mr. Harmon included in his letter. These “rules” sound more like ivory tower, professor mumbo-jumbo than real-life situations.
It would seem that Mr. Harmon seeks to characterize liberals as “useful idiots,” wording he incorrectly attributes to Vladimir Lenin.
Neither Lenin nor Stalin ever were documented as having used them.
A 1987 study for the Library of Congress failed to find any examples of written use by Lenin of this two-word attack/insult.
In closing, anyone who contributes a letter to the editor should be careful to use his or her own words, or else show borrowed words within quotation marks.
Sincerely,
Glen E. Priest
Portland

Mess is concerning
To the editor:
Concerning the self-induced mess the V.A. health care system has dug itself into (especially in Arizona, it causes me, and many others I hope, to wonder what this nation is coming to when death row inmates have greater access to government health care than disabled veterans.
Respectfully,
Roy L. Leverich
Veterans Service Officer
Jay County[[In-content Ad]]