Mr. George Roof and Mr. Frank Daniels, I read both your Letters to the Editor in the Delaware State News on Oct. 24 and Oct. 26, respectively (“Recent letter places no blame on Democratic Party” and “Lies, lies and more lies from the president”). Both of you brought up valid points, but some of them were incorrect. When you start accusing our current president and his party of misdeeds, the flag needs to be thrown.
As far as I am concerned, no matter which party has the majority, nothing seems to get accomplished. Mr. Daniels, you are correct to say our president shouldn’t be mandating these vaccines. He should let the companies write their own policies or put out a mandate when you should get vaccinated. Also, the president pulled the Keystone XL pipeline build permit, and he had good reason. Why have a pipeline going through our country that doesn’t benefit the U.S. when, in the end, only 1,000 people lost their jobs?
As for the oil industry, hasn’t there been enough excess? The entire permit process hasn’t been revised in years. As for the border, migrants get tested for COVID-19 before they enter the U.S. per Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. As for a border wall: George Patton said, “Fixed fortifications are monuments to man’s stupidity.”
Mr. Roof: The Port of Los Angeles is unionized, and it was never open 24/7, and the current governor (Gavin Newsom) put restrictions in place for the trucking industry, and the port is not very modern. To both writers: When it comes to the gas prices, a lot of it precedes Joe Biden.
Mr. Daniels: The reason Jake Sullivan asked OPEC to increase production was because it cut oil production during the pandemic. It will eventually affect the global market and not be fully recovered until 2022, not because of what Biden did. True, the U.S. did export more oil than it produced, but it was an oil surplus, and Donald Trump sent it overseas. The smarter president would have kept the extra oil and added it to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which needs a replenishment. No president, whether Democrat or Republican, can do much of anything to affect the price of oil. What is truly needed is an independent organization to regulate the oil industry, with the teeth to prosecute wrongdoing.
As for Afghanistan, it’s not Biden’s fault. Trump was the one who brokered the Doha agreement with the Taliban and gave all those concessions without the central government being involved. Trump was one of the biggest advocates of getting us out of the country, and he and the generals had four years to make it happen. Trump didn’t lift a finger until it got near election time. As H.R. McMaster said, “Pompeo] signed a surrender agreement with the Taliban.”
Gentlemen, look at the country itself. Afghanistan is landlocked, no oceans or seas. If our own Navy had been offshore, more could have been evacuated. The last major airlift the U.S. accomplished was “Fiery Vigil” in the Philippines, and that was in 1991. It has been over 30 years. The airfields were the key. Bagram closed, and Biden could have delayed it, but where are you going to get 8,000 people on short notice? Lastly, Mazar-e-Sharif wasn’t even part of the plan.
Lonnie Brewer
Dover
