Should Scheller Be A Columnist?

As you know I have of late been publishing much of my commentary as Letters to the Editor of my local paper the Fort Lee Suburbanite. This frequently gets me into exchanges with people who have a different viewpoint making for, what I consider to be interesting dialogue.

A week ago Friday, on August 15, a Letter to the Editor was published a copy of which I reproduce below:



To the Editor:

I am flattered by Shel Haas’ Letter to the Editor entitled “Give Mr. Scheller his own column” Suburbanite August 15. I would like nothing better. I have dreamt of being a columnist since the days when Walter Lippmann graced the pages of the New York Herald Tribune.

As for my never having met a Democrat I didn’t like, let me assure Mr. Hass that there have been very many, among them Senators Bilbo of Mississippi, Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Governor George Wallace of Alabama, to name a few from the past. But there are quite a few today, such as Ed Koch of New York and Joe Lieberman of Connecticut.

As for being a dud in economics, I will match my knowledge of economics with Mr. Haas, and even Senator McCain, any day of the week, and I assure him that it doesn’t require much knowledge to accomplish this feat.

If Mr. Haas would read my letters with greater care he would see that my facts are not from Democratic sources. My citing the use vehicles in China compared to ours came from T. Boone Pickens, as good a Republican as one could find, and as I stated, a financier of the Swift Boat ads.

As for drilling in Alaska, even John McCain opposes that harebrained scheme, for it would endanger some the most pristine lands in the world and would not produce enough oil to make a significant contribution to the world supply.

The principles of the Sierra Club to which Mr. Haas refers with such venom are to preserve the God given beauty and the environment of our nation, a goal to which Republican President Theodore Roosevelt, a man who McCain has cited as being the President he most admires, was dedicated.

Mr. Haas describes global warming as “the biggest farce of them all” ignoring the fact that it is an accepted fact by the overwhelming majority of the scientific community, by Senator McCain, and finally even by that long denier of it, President Bush. If Mr. Haas wants to remain in denial that is his privilege, but he might as well deny that the earth rotates around the sun rather than the other way around.

Finally I am at a loss to understand how my views are “opposite President Kennedy’s.” Mr. Haas does not even give us a clue as to how he arrived at this strange conclusion.

Emil Scheller
Fort Lee, New Jersey