I didn’t expect to be writing this letter about Dan Shannon’s column (A White Elephant problem,” published Sept. 8) after reading his initial column a few weeks ago, where he explained how he would only be concerned with the facts of any given situation that he might be referring to. Wow, was I wrong.

Facts, boy I don’t know, he puts out lots of numbers associated with his “opinions” of various situations, but there are zero source references to support any of his claims. Here’s one fact that he failed to mention when he referred to 9/11: While it was a terrible tragedy, perpetrated by a small group of terrorists, we went to war with two countries, one of which wasn’t even involved in that tragedy, and killed approximately 71,000 Afghan civilians, and even worse, between 187,000 and 207,000 Iraqi civilians. How many more terrorists do you suppose these tragedies may have created?

Five dollar a gallon gas? Where is that in evidence? As it turns out there are many reasons for gas prices to rise and fall, none of which any president may or may not be responsible for, which include: The dot com bust putting a chill on the economy, falling U.S. production giving OPEC more pricing power, rising oil prices helping spur the 2008-2009 recession, which crashed oil prices, economic recovery sending oil prices back to $100/bbl, U.S. fracking boom breaking OPEC’s hold on oil prices, again crashing prices, and prices declining because of COVID-19. All of these things happened over the course of the terms of 3 different presidents: Bush, Obama and Trump.

Illegal immigration and its effects: His claim that illegals are responsible for “so much crime” in our country while several empirical studies generally find that immigrants do not increase local crime rates, and are less likely to cause crime than their native-born peers, and are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Our thriving economy depends on illegals to keep prices and wages low. If politicians wanted to stop illegal immigration all they would have to do is prosecute businesses that hire them. It’s that simple, but neither party will admit to that or do anything about it. He also makes no mention of the fact that the right’s “God,” Ronald Reagan, gave amnesty to 3 million illegals when he was president.

“Billions of dollars of military equipment left behind?” All that was left behind was destroyed except for equipment in the hands of the Afghan armies.

Finally, respect: Referring to our current president as “Old Joe” and a past president, probably one of the greatest humanitarians in our history, as “Mr. Peanut” is beyond disparaging. Dan Shannon, “The Smartest Man in the Room?” From the actual “facts” quoted in his column, he must be the only one in the room, just sayin’.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw