Letters to the Editor for Saturday, January 30, 2010

Wonderful support for the troops
I just wanted to take a minute to express my deepest gratitude to Liberty University for the unwavering commitment to the soldiers and families of the 1-116th Virginia Army National Guard Unit who have deployed earlier this month.

We had planned to have the farewell ceremony at the D-Day Memorial; because of the cold weather, we switched at the last minute to the Schilling Center. Ernest Carter, Barry Moore and Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. were more than accommodating. Not only did they provide the venue, they also put up 800 chairs and provided refreshments for everyone who attended, with very short notice and no cost to our soldiers.

The people at Thomas Road Baptist Church also contacted me with military Bibles for all the soldiers here in the Lynchburg unit and had a special dedication at one of their services for our soldiers and their families.

In the 13 years that my husband (Lt. Col. E. Scott Smith, battalion commander of the 1-116th) and I have been married, we have never been stationed in a town more willing to support our soldiers and their families than this one and we have been stationed all over the country.

Words cannot express my gratitude to LU and to everyone in the community who helped us send off our soldiers, including the Virginia Defense Force, the VFW and American Legion.
JACKIE SMITH
Evington

Historic moment
Years from now, historians will delight in trying to figure out if liberal Democrats ever fully understood the political changes that occurred in the 2009 elections in Virginia and New Jersey and the victory of Scott Brown in the 2010 vote for Ted Kennedy’s seat in the United States Senate.

President Barack Obama and his enablers don’t seem to get it. To put it succinctly, a growing number of Americans do not want what Obama, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid want to shove down our throats as “change we can believe in.”

The liberal Democrats have alienated the clear-thinking folks of this nation even more than President Jimmy Carter did, and that takes some doing. In one year, President Barack Obama has managed to make it clear to this nation that he is the worst president that has ever been elected in this country. Pelosi and Reid have achieved the same results as heads of the House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate.

We need a change from this “Chicago-style wink-and-nod politics” in our federal government. The elections in November and 2012 will bring us change that we can really believe in, provided that people continue to vote for the content of the character of the candidate and not whether he or she wants to buy our votes for big government.

Our Founding Fathers did not buy votes. They sold good ideas about how a government should be run. Let’s get back to good salesmanship of good ideas and abandon bribery for political gain.

We need to take our country back from those who want to buy our support for their own agenda. As always, it is not a Democratic or Republican issue; it is an issue for all of the people and that is the way it should be when we choose who will rule us in this free nation.

Democrats like Maxine Waters may mock the Tea Party participants by calling them “Tea Baggers,” but there are those among us who actually respect and admire the guts and vision of those who fought to create this nation. The United States of America is a great country, and the freedom it offers is not for sale to the highest bidder.

It takes a lot of gall to bribe the American people for power with their own money.
RICHARD EFTHIM
Lynchburg