To the editor:

In the wake of the California recall, it seems appropriate to make a couple of comments on this that might work on the national level. First, we recall President Bush and his “team of experts” for their Cold-War-Kremlin-like fib-telling.

Examples of this behavior spring easily to mind. In a recent speech, the president set a record for the most baldfaced lies told to a cheering crowd in the United States since the Nixon administration. He reported “progress” in the Middle East, the benefits to the environment of his plan to let polluters off the hook, that the neoconservative plan to Americanize the Middle East is a “war on terror” (the neocons actually need the terrorists, and I’m not convinced that they wouldn’t employ them), and Bush even managed to diss therapy as a problem-solving tool in this amazing emission of verbal horse feathers. (Hmm…)

Another example is a magazine that our tax dollars are paying for called “HI,” a badly translated Arab language “lifestyle” magazine being issued in the Middle East. Telling of the invasion of Arab music to the United States (music that we simply can’t stop dancing to) and the joys of “sand boarding,” HI is a slickly packaged effort to begin the process of dumbing down the public, a process perfected in this country.

If image is all one needs to be a powerful executive, let’s recall Bush and elect, say, Johnny Depp. He’s pretty and portrays freakish characters quite well.

Doug Harvey,

Lawrence