Dear Editor,

I am tired of the double standards in our politics today, and I suspect I’m not alone.

We are lectured on patriotism by people who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, and by politicians who now deny it was a violent attack on our government at all, despite over 1,270 convictions and more than 140 injured police officers. We are lectured on freedom by politicians who promote banning books from our public schools and public libraries — PEN America has documented over 22,800 school book bans since 2021, concentrated heavily in states like Florida, Texas, and Tennessee. We are told to “protect life” by congressional members who simultaneously voted to cut Medicaid coverage and SNAP benefits for new mothers, the poor, and the disabled, in a bill the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates will cause 11.8 million Americans to lose Medicaid coverage.

We are lectured on law and order by a party that stands behind a president convicted on 34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the state of New York. And we’re lectured on family values and morality by a party whose administration spent months calling the Epstein files a “hoax,” resisted a bipartisan effort to force their release, and then had its own Justice Department declare the release “final” over — even as Epstein’s powerful associates remain unnamed and unaccountable.

If patriotism, freedom, life, law, and morality mean anything, they have to be measured by what people do, not what they say at a podium. Get out and vote for consistency, not slogans that collapse the moment they are inconvenient.

Sincerely,

Larry Podolsky