To the editor:

I had to laugh at Jim Dyment’s rebuttal to my letter to the editor. I never did find out which letter he was referring to.

The most recent one I wrote was about taxes — how they are spent and how most people don’t realize how much America spends on making and exporting war. It wasn’t a cavalcade of recent wars and who was president when they took place and which politically connected capitalists made a killing in war profits and, how did Ross Perot get into the picture?

Please Mr. Dyment, if you feel it imperative to rebut a letter I’ve written, then please read the letter and put some thought into the rebuttal. Look up the facts that I always try to include in letters to the editor.

I certainly don’t need any more lessons you learned from Fox News on how miraculous “capitalism” is.

Speaking of capitalism, the southern coast of America is getting a taste of what it’s like to be at the mercy of the miracle of capitalism.

BP is displaying one of the benefits of unfettered capitalism. Gulf of Mexico fisheries and tourism will be ruined for generations.

BP has a cap on damages that they are responsible for, but if the smaller spill in the Exxon Valdez tanker accident is any indication, this damage will never be mitigated, at least for several generations.

Of course, if you get your facts from the likes of Rush Limbaugh, then all’s well. This is, of course, total fabrication on his part. Twenty years later the cleanup still isn’t complete from the Exxon Valdez disaster.

What bothers me the most as an American and a lover of freedom and liberty, is that the interests of business, of capitalism, of the health-insurance industry, of Wall Street banker greed, of war profiteering, of brutality toward human beings and a disdain for the environment has become synonymous with “patriotism.”

Dan Freeman

Clinton