Editor, the News-Herald:

I thought conservative spin doctors mostly kept in packs inside the beltway. Mr. Pocklington roams outside the fold as far south as Suffolk and the Great Dismal hunting grounds. His spin on John Wilkes Booth portrays a southern gentleman who was merely conserving the right to own human beings as slaves and who should be excused for assassinating a man (Lincoln) who was so liberal he proclaimed that all men being born equal should be free and would threaten to relieve Mr. Booth and others of their legal property.

What the three or four liberals that currently threaten good Republican citizens of Suffolk with, Mr. Pocklington, is a grievously learned historical lesson. The liberal, Lyndon B. Johnson, who called for and signed such locally unpopular legislation into law as Medicare and civil rights, and was the first to recognize poverty and hunger in our country, was misled into believing that democracy could be forcibly inserted into a country with little experience or support for it.

The tragic loss of 58,000 American lives and countless Vietnamese in an unwinnable war left the federal coffers with huge deficits. We liberals here are skeptical that democracy can take root in the sands of Iraq if it couldn’t in the fertile jungles of Vietnam. We wonder that since our president declared victory more than two years ago in Iraq and its infamous tyrant had been captured, why there are still daily firefights in an area that should have been pacified.

Mr. Bush, affectionately know as &uot;shrub&uot; in Texas, who twice campaigned against those free-spending Democrats, Gore and Kerry, has been able to persuade his Republican Congress to support deficit spending measures to spread the costs of his adventure in history-making help his friends at Haliburton. I just want to point out, for all his faults, the liberal Bill Clinton was the first president in memory to reduce the national budget and secure a robust business economy.

Louis S. Seyler

Suffolk