OPINION

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OUR READERS’ VIEWPOINTS

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR

Biden’s ‘accomplishments’

Editor:

Just a note to ask how it is going after Joe Biden got elected. Let’s see. Gas has doubled. About a million illegals stormed into our country. We can’t get anybody to work because they get paid to not work. Then they tell the illegals after they get their hearing to come back in five years to see if they can stay. Well, we know how that is not going to happen. In five years, they will have as many as five kids who will be Americans because they were born here. And they will get the $350 for each kid. That’s the only skill they have.

Anybody that is OK with that should grab both ears and pull real hard until they hear that popping sound and you see daylight.

Robert Jones Goodyear Heartfelt thanks

Editor:

I would like to personally thank Mr. Logan for his kind words in the Oct. 6 issue of the West Valley View. It is comforting to know that there are others out there who look for facts in what they use to formulate their opinions.

Ironically, I am a carpenter, a master carpenter at that (fact).

I have been a general contractor for over 43 years (fact). Prior to my 18-year teaching career (fact), I had a 23-plus-year career as a contractor where I not only hit nails on the head but also built my company into one of the largest framing companies in Southern California. Fact!

Thomas M. Rico Goodyear

Economies in peril

Editor:

Access to affordable health care, child care, paid family leave and other critical issues should be a concern for every Arizonan and American alike. It’s especially a concern for small-business owners like me who are mothers and are worried about providing for their families and keeping them safe. Our recovery still hangs in the balance, but some of these challenges can be addressed now by Congress passing the Build Back Better plan to invest in health care, child care, paid family leave and other critical issues for middle-class Americans and small businesses.

These investments would come at a critical time. Small businesses are struggling to keep their doors open and their employees safe, and it’s no surprise that 19 months since the initial COVID-19 outbreak, the small-business community is still nowhere near back to pre-pandemic levels. We need lawmakers to pass critical measures such as the Build Back Better proposal to build a more resilient economy for all. What’s more, leaders in Congress should work toward leveling the playing field for small businesses by closing the corporate tax loopholes that unfairly benefit the wealthy at the expense of small-business owners, their employees and independent entrepreneurs.

Every minute they choose to delay this critical funding puts our local and national economies in peril.

Delinda Cornist Small-business owner Avondale

Concerning school budget overrides

ing over our finances last night and came to the conclusion that in order to spend the money we want, I will need a greater than 15% raise for the next five years.

Boss: No.

Think about this: • A portion of our state income tax goes to education. • A portion of our sales tax goes to education. • A portion of lottery proceeds goes to education. • A portion of sales tax on recreational marijuana goes to education. • A portion of our federal income tax goes to education.

And, of course, there is the new excise tax on the wealthy which goes to education because we cannot let success go unpunished.

Not to mention a large and growing portion of our property taxes go to education.

Our schools have all these sources of income yet with all their bachelor’s,

SMITH’S OPINION — Las Vegas Sun

master’s and Ph.D. degrees they cannot figure out how to do what you and I do every day — live within our means.

Perhaps is time we started acting like the boss and just say no.

Tom Barkley Litchfield Park

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The West Valley View welcomes letters that express readers’ opinion on current topics. Letters must include the writer’s full name, address (including city) and telephone number. The West Valley View will print the writer’s name and city of residence only. Letters without the requisite identifying information will not be published. Letters are published in the order received, and they are subject to editing. The West Valley View will not publish consumer complaints, form letters, clippings from other publications or poetry.

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WEST VALLEY VIEW NEWS | OCTOBER 20, 2021

Freedom of speech needs leeway

BY DAVID LEIBOWITZ

West Valley View Columnist

Today’s revelation should surprise exactly no one: There is a difference between what each of us says in public and what we say in private to friends.

In public, in the workplace helping a customer or via Zoom with a client, we clean things up. We avoid controversy, mind our language, sand the edges off opinions.

This is not a fictional self; it is an aspect of who we are. I view it as part of the social contract. In public, most of us agree to put forward our best selves.

Then there’s what happens in private.

I’ve had beers with conservative politicians who drop f-bombs. Played golf with “woker than thou” progressives who comment on the cart girl’s chest. I’ve been emailed a thousand obscene memes and a thousand jokes about Jews and every other ethnicity on the planet.

I’ve said countless things in private that, should I express them in this column, would surely get me fired.

Which brings us to suddenly former Las Vegas Raiders football coach Jon Gruden, embattled comedian Dave Chappelle, and the confusing state of life in 2021.

Gruden resigned last week after a trove of years-old personal emails between him and some guy friends, including Bruce Allen, then-president of the Washington Football Team, became public as part of an NFL investigation into Washington’s toxic workplace culture.

Gruden played no part in that culture, having never worked for the team, but he did “casually and frequently (unleash) misogynistic and homophobic language over several years to denigrate people,” according to the New York Times.

Among those people? NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, labeled by Gruden as a “clueless anti-football (expletive)” and DeMaurice Smith, head of the NFL players union, a Black man Gruden said “has lips the size of michellin (sic) tires.”

The NFL immediately condemned that email — which Gruden wrote in 2010 — as “appalling, abhorrent and wholly contrary to the NFL’s values.”

Then the league went right back to gridiron games involving highly compensated domestic abusers, sexual violators and assorted other miscreants.

Little shocks me about Gruden, a macho jerk in private who kept his offensive ideas to himself for his 8-year run on “Monday Night Football.” Had Gruden voiced unleashed a tirade on air, I would have supported firing him.

What I don’t support is the Opinion Police coming for him based on decade-old private emails.

There’s a difference between repugnant opinions kept to ourselves or shared with friends and what we do and say around everyone else. If the new American social contract demands pristine behavior 24/7, who among us can meet that standard?

Then there’s Chappelle. The very definition of a comedian is someone who has no filter, who says in public that which none of us dares speak.

Comedians’ jokes offend, but they also serve as human WD-40, a lubricant between people and ideas. If Chappelle’s joking about the gay and trans community offends, well, that’s literally in his job description.

The unwritten rule seems to be that it’s fine for Chappelle to joke about Black people because he’s Black. In the same vein, I can joke about Jews because my name is Leibowitz.

But stray out of your lane, be offensive about a group to which you don’t belong, and you’ll be cancelled, pronto.

I’d advocate for a different standard, a culture where freedom of speech includes leeway for time and place, private versus public. I’d also prefer a culture that can still take a joke.

Under the new rules, it’s only a matter of time before the Opinion Police come for all of us, no matter how polite we think, act or speak.

David Leibowitz has called the Valley home since 1995. Contact david@leibowitzsolo.com

BY J.D. HAYWORTH

West Valley View Columnist

Call it “Build Back Bitter.”

Joe Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending “sharknado” apparently watered down by members of his own party. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi knew just who to blame: the reporters who cover the proceedings under the Capitol dome.

“I think you all could do a better job of selling it, to be frank with you,” Pelosi said. Got that? Pelosi believes that the press corps is just an unelected part of her House Democrat caucus advocating for the left, not reporting objectively. And based on recent history, she’s right.

Corporate media made a collective decision in 2016: Our nation needed its first female president, and with their unremittingly sympathetic reporting, Hillary Clinton would make history “her story.” Besides, those filling the newsrooms and executive suites regarded Donald Trump as an egomaniacal outsider. To their surprise, he became the Republican nominee. From the day in 2015 when he announced his candidacy, the press escalated its attacks on the political novice, growing increasingly flummoxed as Trump soon became the GOP frontrunner.

Then, the unthinkable happened: Trump was elected the 45th president. Not only did the networks have trouble minding manners, but the taxpayer-financed Voice of America (VOA) dissolved into the tears of a clown. Radio/ TV insiders relayed a revealing tale from deep inside the broadcast bureaucracy.

Amanda Bennett, then the VOA director, ordered the production of a celebratory documentary, “America’s First Woman President,” to be aired once the inevitable had occurred. When the inevitable yielded to the improbable, Bennett cried and other staffers scrambled, scurrying to fill the gap with somber live coverage that supplanted the joyous pre-produced, planned programming.

Though the press partisans came emotionally undone over the 2016 results, they were far from done. Trump may have been sworn in, but he became a figure to be sworn at, with journalistic coverage full of sound, fury and falsehoods.

Russiagate. Kids in cages. Two weeks to flatten the curve. Voter ID is racist. Vote fraud is rare. The 2020 election was secure. To those journalistic themes and scores more, Trump offered a two-word response — fake news.

Others offered a similar, earlier message in much more sophisticated prose. Trump’s presidential predecessor retained the services of a “late 30-something” Ben Rhodes, a one-time aspiring novelist who was given a title too long for a book cover: “Deputy National Security Adviser for Strategic Communications.”

The fact that his brother, David, was president of CBS News at the time made Ben’s hiring a “two-fer” in the eyes of Barack Obama: a “creative writer” with a sibling presiding over a bevy of “creative communicators.” Sure enough, Ben confessed to the New York Times Magazine that the successful messaging of the U.S.-Iran nuke deal and the diplomatic recognition of communist Cuba depended upon “compelling: narratives, not necessarily factual, nor true.

And those narratives were served up to sympathetic reporters gullible enough to swallow them hook, line and sinker. Rhodes didn’t call those journalists “gullible”— he called them know-nothings. In that same worshipful profile, he described the average reporter in the White House Press Corps as someone “27 years old” whose “only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.”

Americans have learned a little something about the politicization of the press: It is real, it is rabid, and it is radical. What’s more, it has prompted a reaction of revulsion.

July brought these results from a Gallup Poll: Americans with “quite a lot” or a “great deal” of confidence in newspapers totaled just 21%. For television, it was even lower: only 16%.

The prevailing political view of the press — Orange man bad, senile man superb — jeopardizes American journalism, which badly needs reform — except in the eyes of journalists. They regard it as the “Build Back Bummer.”

J.D. Hayworth represented Arizona in the U.S. House from 1995-2007. He authored and sponsored the Enforcement First Act, legislation that would have mandated enforcement of Federal Immigration Law in the 109th Congress.