Dear Editor

As much as I enjoy reading the Irish Independent about things Irish, I can only cringe when I read your commentary about things American.  Your continual contentment with the superficial and the stereotypical confounds and disappoints.  You are smarter than all that.

 

Ian O'Doherty's "Thank God for George W. Bush" is a case in point.  O'Doherty bases his understanding of American politics on the "brilliant book" by Thomas Frank, "What's The Matter With Kansas."  The Independent reader has no way of knowing that Frank is a self-professed Marxist who grew up in the state's toniest bastion and has been hating himself for it ever since.  Like so many on the deep American left--Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky come to mind--Frank can traffic freely in half truth and fiction because the culture establishment in the US and Europe enjoys the dumb show too much to check facts.

 

I have a closer perspective as Frank does a five-page profile of me in his book.  This came as a major surprise to me since I neither live or work in Kansas and have little interest in Kansas politics.  At a public forum, I explained to him that if he had ever bothered to call me--"I'm in the book, Tom"--he might have gotten at least SOMETHING right, like my state of residence (Missouri).

 

Despite the pleadings of Mister Frank and acolyte O'Doherty, the Democrats have become the party of "big business" in America.  Every one of the nation's iconic billionaires is an out-of-the-closet Dem.  This includes George Soros, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, Ted Turner, Donald Trump, Lucy Walton, and Martha Stewart for starters.  The Republican Party is and has been the party of small business and entrepreneurs.  In the United States, unlike Ireland, the great majority of social conservatives also champion free enterprise given their belief in limited constitutional government.  Indeed, Franks ridicules me in the book for being both a social conservative and a free marketer, an entirely unremarkable combination chez nous.

 

If Mr. O'Doherty would call me I would be happy to explain to him how America really works. In every poll ever taken, Republicans test higher on educational background and political knowledge.  They don't vote that way because they are stupid.

 

Jack Cashill
Galway