Dear Editor:

Like Carol Gloor, Paul Gale parroted all the Democrat talking points on Social Security reform ("Cost-cutting measure 'a disaster to seniors,’” Feb. 22-23 Times-Journal/Mirror-Democrat), and like Carol, his letter amounted to little more than Democrat histrionics.

Rick Scott's platform proposals on Social Security and Medicare will be DOA for all of the reasons I cited in my original letter and hence, are irrelevant. Like Carol, Paul knows this, or at least he should, but chooses to demagogue the issue for partisan advantage. The fact that both programs are actuarially unsound is known to both parties but neither party will address the issue seriously until forced to do so.

It has been stated that people watch auto racing to see if someone will be killed in a fiery crash. Watching Joe Biden speak in public has much the same fascination; his audience is waiting for him to go off script and make yet another gaffe for his handlers to clean up. Lacking the requisite morbid voyeurism for either, I do not watch Nascar or Biden speeches, nor do I yell "liar" at Biden on TV, as that would be to belabor the obvious.

When one finds himself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging. Faced with a national debt in real terms not seen since World War II, one would read Paul Gale's letter in vain for any suggestion of how to rein in unsustainable federal deficits.

Book banning is a bipartisan sport and the recent bowdlerization of Roald Dahl's books by woke leftists shows that there is more than one way to ban a book. Rewriting them to accord with currently fashionable standards is arguably more pernicious than banning or burning them as the latter will inevitably fail to eliminate the original. As Ray Bradbury stated when his book "Fahrenheit 451" was stealth-edited to placate irate feminists, "There is more than one way to burn a book and the world is full of people running around with lit matches."

Paul should take one of those sleeping pills. He might feel better and see the world more clearly after a good night's sleep.

David Hanson

Savanna