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Lies are uncivil discourse

Dear Editor:

It seems the truth hurts and, with some people, hits a nerve. Strange how they are angry at me for calling a person who tells lies a liar but aren’t angry at the person who told the lies. It would be illuminating if one of them could explain how making a statement of fact about a person’s actions are an insult. If I called a person sliding down a snowy mountainside on flat boards a “skier,” would that also be an insult? Blatant skier! Egregious skier! Where is the insult? Nope, it’s a statement of fact.

“Toxic name-calling” – I’m laughing out loud at that one. You think calling a dishonest person a liar is toxic? What rational humans would consider toxic language probably would be edited out, even by The Aspen Times. But then, maybe that letter-writer just has a very limited vocabulary. And yet he feels free to make insulting references to me. Methinks thou dost protest too much.



And Sheldon Fingerman – what alternate universe does he live in? Probably one where Spock wears a goatee and reality and fact are unknown concepts. Does he really expect us to believe that a person can write an “opinion” and that, as such, nothing they state can be a lie? Let’s try a mind exercise for Sheldon. I hereby firmly state that it is my opinion that one plus one equals three. Now, I made it a little past first grade, so I know that one plus one equals two, so was my “opinion” a lie? And yes, I’m sure both sides were lying, Sheldon, but my letter was specifically about Melanie Sturm’s lies. But good try at deflecting us away from the inconvenient facts. I will defend Fingerman’s right to have an opinion (no matter how whiny it sounds), but he has no right to make up his own facts, nor does Sturm.

As a side note, Mr. Fingerman, my letter was written and sent to the Times two days before the election. I had no control over when it was printed. By the way, is it painful having your foot in your mouth, or do you have it in there so often that you’ve gotten used to it?




As for poor Maurice Emmer, who obviously has very little in the way of reading-comprehension skills, if he had read my letter he would see that I did present data that prove Sturm was lying, and I could have presented even more if not for the need to keep my letter short enough to fit into the paper. As for civility, where is the civility in lying to us to try to promote her beliefs? Frankly, I’m sick of people lying all the time. I’m sick of people who will do or say anything to try to win. If their methods and policies are so good, I’ll ask again, why do they have to lie to make them sound better than the opposition’s? Wouldn’t the choice be clear if they just stated the facts? Obviously, and logically, the only reason to lie would be because they know they’re wrong. And just why do these people think that it is worse to call out a liar on their lies than it is to be a liar?

These people are outraged at me for calling a liar a liar, but they aren’t outraged at a president who started an illegal war that is costing us $5 trillion? They aren’t outraged that the politicians they voted into office gutted the banking laws so that banks could make billions and cause a recession? They aren’t outraged that their candidate for president wants to take the money we all pay into Social Security and give it to those same immoral, incompetent bankers? They aren’t outraged that their leaders are trying to blame all these problems not on the people who caused the problems but on the schmuck who inherited them? They aren’t outraged that these same leaders were so intent on removing President Obama from office that they have blocked and delayed every action that could help our country just to try to make him look worse? Why don’t you try placing your outrage where it belongs?

Yes, I’m disrespectful. I don’t respect liars. I don’t respect people who support and condone liars. I don’t respect hypocrites. I don’t respect people who steal, no matter how clever their thievery. And I don’t respect people who are willfully ignorant and too closed-minded to acknowledge facts that contradict their precious opinions. “Minds are like parachutes; they only function when they are open.” Right now, there are quite a few people in this country plummeting toward the ground. Thankfully we all still live in a country where we are free to share our opinions even if they are based on fiction. Just don’t expect that no one will want to exercise their freedom of speech when someone tells us lies. Especially when those lies are designed to try to give control of our country to people who want to take those very freedoms away from us.

Agustin Goba

Snowmass Village