Spare us the pearl-clutching
Re "Amy Acton won't debate. Is she afraid her mask will slip and we'll see the truth?" online Sept. 9: The sudden Republican reverence for political debates is a little hard to take seriously.
Donald Trump skipped every Republican presidential primary debate in 2024. Mike DeWine refused to debate Nan Whaley in 2022. Somehow, democracy survived.
But Amy Acton declines to debate Vivek Ramaswamy, and suddenly we're told she has “contempt for voters” and must be hiding her true beliefs. How convenient.
And Phillip Derrow's privilege is showing.
After an armed man forced his way through a crowd trying to reach Acton, knocking people down in the process, Derrow uses the incident to lecture her about making herself more accessible to people who want to question
her. The lack of perspective is remarkable.
The rest of the column isn't much better. What begins as a complaint about debates somehow careens through Michigan politics, Hasan Piker, Israel, Abigail Spanberger and, bizarrely, what Acton supposedly owes voters because she is Jewish.
Want to scrutinize Amy Acton? Scrutinize her. Ask about her record, policies and plans for Ohio. Do the same for Ramaswamy.
But spare us the pearl-clutching about the sacred duty to debate.
That principle seems to become sacred only when a Democrat declines.
That's not principle. That's selective outrage dressed up as civic concern.
Zachary Branstool, Columbus
Husted's ads are delusional and wrong
I had the misfortune of spending considerable time watching TV in a medical waiting room. The TV was tuned to a channel showing the renovation of an old hotel to bring it up to snuff. That was interesting to me, so I watched.
I soon grew bored, however, because every few minutes, the show was interrupted by political ads, most of which were for Jon Husted. The ads claimed that, if elected, Jon would lower our taxes, increase our pay and do other good things.
Then there were his anti-Sherrod Brown ads telling us the bad things that would happen if Brown were elected. Brown would increase our taxes and bring in such practices as sex-change operations in our schools.
How many of these claims could be accomplished by a single senator? None. It would take a concerted effort by the controlling political party to do any of them.
Sex-change operations in schools? Nobody on either side of the aisle is proposing that. And as for the positive claims for Husted, it would take a unified effort by the Republicans to accomplish those things.
Wait! The Republicans have been in control of Ohio politics for decades, and they have a majority in Congress. Why haven’t they already accomplished what Husted proposes?
Ben Freudenreich, Columbus
We're paying for cages and leashes
Haitian families who came here legally, who work, who pay taxes, who did nothing wrong, were ordered into ICE offices this summer and sent home wearing GPS monitors on their ankles with a 75-mile leash.
Now enforcement is surging in the city; pastors have been detained, and a young Haitian student is dead. They took their protected status without cause.
Call it what it is. These are people who were told to report and reported because they have followed every rule they were given. Hunting them now is not law enforcement. It is a canned hunt, where the hunted are staged in the field before the hunter arrives, and we call that shameful when it is done to deer.
Worse yet, our very tax dollars are paying for inhumane cages, bad food, little medical care, split families, flights to unsafe third countries, all of this with no promise of a hearing.
And most of us go about our days as if none of it is happening.
In November, Ohio picks a governor who will either continue to hand this state's police power to ICE or refuse it. This year, we must vote like our neighbor's life depends on it, because it does.
Tracy Reiss, Akron
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Spare us pearl-clutching over Acton not debating when you never criticize Ramaswamy | Letters
