To the editor:

The 70th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor has passed with our nation paying little attention to this most perfidious of days. The majority of our citizens, busy forgetting September 11, cannot focus on what they view as ancient history.  

The oil still leaks from the Arizona where it lays beneath the waters off Oahu, but the American consciousness remains largely unmoved and uninformed.

The bombing, of course, precipitated World War II and allowed one of our most incompetent Presidents, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, to assume a larger role in history than he deserved. Though told repeatedly by Admiral J. O. Richardson and others that relocating the Pacific Fleet from San Diego to Honolulu would make it vulnerable to a Japanese attack, he chose to move it directly into harm’s way and thus sacrificed the lives of thousands of American military men.

His now-famous “Day of Infamy” speech should have included a mea culpa for this hubristic putridity, his depleting of the American military resources through the lend-lease program, his unnecessary provocation of the Japanese and the aiding of Germany’s enemies who had declared war to protect Poland, a country they would subsequently sacrifice to Joseph Stalin’s Iron Curtain.  

Roosevelt, who would die in a room with his mistress — not his wife — should be relegated to the lower tier of U.S. presidents, a rather despicable creature for whom Hell no doubt would open wide its gates. Herbert Hoover’s recently discovered history of WWII affirms this analysis.