Mr. DeVol, I’m not sure why you felt the need to level a personal attack against a newspaper columnist (Courier-Herald, April 14), but you only exposed yourself as a product of Fox News and the Beck/Palin shallow mentality that passes for learned debate today.

Don’t attack the person Mr. DeVol, attack the ideas. Show your work. Don’t respond to his ideas with parsed right-wing rhetoric, prove where he is wrong. Give facts to support your assertions instead of boilerplate nonsense you get from the right. You do yourself a disservice.

Your attack against Mr. Beckley says that you equate young with being stupid and not yet ready to understand the “real” world. You equate being young and a product of our education system with being unable to string words together because he lacks “real” world experience.

Even if all that is true, and of course it is not, you undermine your own “argument” by defaming him right off the bat. It’s obvious you hold his views and his leanings in disdain and nothing he can say will make a difference to you.

You assert that we have lost freedoms and choices, yet you don’t tell us what they are. You don’t because you can’t. And that’s because we haven’t lost any.

You assert that the healthcare law (it is no longer a bill) will hurt insurance companies. I think we all know that is not going to be the case. You say that the new law will cost us money. Duh. Are you aware that you now pay for uninsured people right out of your pocket every time they use the emergency room? I’d think you’d be against that. You sound like a personal responsibility kind of guy.

You don’t want debate. You want to wield a hammer when thought will do. You can only attack people and not their words because there is no real weight behind your arguments, just empty phrases that lost your party the healthcare debate. Except for the right, most people want children to have healthcare and don’t want insurance companies dropping Grandma because she’s too old for a procedure.

I don’t know your age, but I’m hoping that you now refuse or will be refusing to use Medicare and Social Security. You can send your SS checks directly to the treasury to help pay down the national debt. And please don’t use other socialist programs like fire departments, police and libraries. I wouldn’t want you to appear to be a hypocrite.

And Mr. DeVol, I would much rather our schools be progressive (look up the meaning of the word) than what you apparently want them to be, which is regressive.

If you want that, move to Texas.

John Meadows

Bonney Lake