Jerry Miskulin – 4/22/10

This page was last updated on April 22, 2010.

Appealing to baser instincts works; Jerry Miskulin; Beaver County Times; April 22, 2010.

I encourage you to review Mr. Miskulin’s body of work in the archives. Mr. Miskulin has written at least 60 letters since 2004 (I didn’t critique all of them.). Most (all?) are illogical and full of falsehoods (not just wrong).

In recent letters, Mr. Miskulin expressed displeasure with the tea parties (here and here), proclaimed “Rush Limbaugh is a propaganda minister,” and told us “Tariff is the best way to reduce deficit.”

Below is a detailed critique of the subject letter.

“I just finished reading ‘The Last European War’ by historian John Lukacs, and there were two quotes that I would like to draw your attention to.

“The first is, ‘It is true that, as (poet and essayist Charles) Peguy said, the massive intrusion of politics and of its rhetoric leads to the degeneration of truth and of thought.’

“The second quote was from poet William Butler Yeats: ‘The best lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity.’

“Perhaps Richard Nixon’s silent majority sums up a lot of what these two quotes offer by means of philosophy. As the book says, ‘What we have now is a triumph of technique over reason.’

“The broad majority of people can be easily manipulated by appealing to their baser instincts rather than their more noble virtues. Politics is no longer a catalyst to higher aims but rather acts to break down a society into its component parts.

“We never impart our true feelings for fear of being ostracized by what is really a minority of people. First it was the Moral Majority, and now it’s the teabaggers coming for you and me. ”

[RWC] More name-calling by Mr. Miskulin. In any case, Mr. Miskulin makes a drive-by implication that tea partiers are “appealing to [our] baser instincts rather than [our] more noble virtues” without providing any examples. I don’t need to explain why.