Satire or smear?

Satire is a difficult thing to pull off, especially in the pages of Numismatic News.

A letter that appeared in the Oct. 9 issue elicited an e-mail to me yesterday that angrily labeled it a smear.

I thought the letter complained of was funny. It arrived in response to another letter that appeared in the Sept. 4 issue saying President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a communist.

The Oct. 9 letter of response contains assertions that are so over the top that I thought surely everyone would get the joke – or will they? What do you think?

The text follows:

Reader Dave Reinkens, in his interesting and insightful Sept. 4 letter, states that FDR was a communist. Well, so was Ronald Reagan, but I don’t hear many people getting upset about it. Both FDR and Reagan expanded and enlarged America’s military so that from 1933 to 1990, the USSR never attempted to attack our country. Not even once. Coincidence? I think not.

The communist Ronald Reagan helped himself to socialized medicine at least 10 times at taxpayer expense, getting over $155,000 in free medical care, all of it paid for by people who do an activity known as “work.” Since 2004, the communists Ashcroft, Cheney and Bush also used socialized medicine to get themselves over $100,000 worth of free gallbladder, cardiac and colon surgery, paid for by – you guessed it – the taxpayers. Apparently “socialized medicine” is fine and wonderful when used by elite millionaires, but horrible and immoral when used by working Americans. Why is this not surprising?

Jim Snyder
Medford, Ore.

That's the full text of the Oct. 9 letter. You know where to find me.