I am very concerned with the line of thinking that leads to opinions such as Brian Bawden's ("Socialists are like Nazis," Readers' Forum, July 25), wherein a legitimate and debatable philosophy such as liberalism is robotically compared to Nazism. Not only does the author sloppily label supporters of the recent health care legislation as socialists, by association he then blames them for 10 times as many deaths as the Third Reich. Letters of this quality are useless in the public debate and should never be printed by a newspaper looking to have a productive discussion on its opinion pages.
I am simply fed up with people demonizing other points of view. Are we so acrimonious that we must have someone to hate in order to get through the day? Are we so intellectually stunted that we have to compare current politicians and citizens to the worst dictators we learned about in our high school history class? I am tired of hearing that so-and-so is evil and destroying our country. I have had my fill of partisan sniping and the endless efforts to tear each other down. And I am really going to lose it if I keep hearing that so-and-so is like Hitler. Political debate is essential in a republic, but we are not going to get anywhere with insults and extreme hyperbole.
Phil Brown
Ogden