I just read a transcript of Condoleeza Rice’s May 22 (I’m a little slow on the uptake) remarks on the occasion of swearing in Gregg Rickman as our first “Anti-Semitism Special Envoy.”

Have you and the rest of Congress gone nuts? Don’t you have enough things to waste our hard-earned tax dollars on?

What in the name of God is an Anti-Semitism Special Envoy?

But if you persist on pouring taxpayer money down a rat hole, how about an “Anti-Catholic Special Envoy” as well, or an “Anti-Baptist Special Envoy”?

And what, pray tell, is the “Global Anti-Semitism Review Act”? We don’t have enough problems already sticking our noses into other people’s business around the world, we have to hunt down “Global Anti-Semitism?

Rice’s thinly-veiled threat, that “governments must take decisive action against the perpetrators” of anti-Semitic hate crimes, sounds suspiciously like the thought police in action.

What is an “anti-Semitic hate crime” anyway? Is it more deserving of punishment than an everyday crime?

And Rice extols Rickman’s “experience on the Hill, working on Holocaust restitution.” Why should “the Hill” be concerned with Holocaust restitution? Were we (the American people) responsible in any way for the Holocaust? The answer is obvious.

So the question remains: Why should we spend one thin dime on “restitution”?

Perhaps you would be so kind as to provide some answers to these questions.

John M. Sharpe

Suffolk