On Decency

Dear Editor:

The down-fall of Senator Mc- Carthy began, not with that famous Murrow interview (as is popularly believed), not even with a furious President Eisenhower ordering none other than Richard Nixon to denounce him. It began with a simple question posed by the attorney of a minor civil servant whom McCarthy had savaged during the witch-hunt he was conducting against our military. “Have you no decency, sir ?” he was asked. As the tape of that defining moment shows, McCarthy and his partner-in-crime, Roy Cohn, were stunned—so much so that, for all the belligerence that preceded it, McCarthy could only sputter some meaningless bromide for an answer.

This same question warrants repeating to Assemblyman Ball: “Have you no decency, sir ?” Or are you so utterly devoid of a conscience that you will not hesitate to exploit something so painfully tragic as the deaths in Brewster last summer of that poor woman and her eight-year-old daughter ? And make no mistake: that is exactly what Mr. Ball is doing—exploiting this terrible tragedy in a shameful attempt to maintain his grip on public office.

Yes, the man responsible for this tragedy was both drunk and here illegally. And, frankly, I hope he rots in prison. By singling him out to rail against, however, Mr. Ball and his cohorts are cynically and deliberately fanning the flames of xenophobia— in much the same way (albeit locally) that Hitler exploited the “otherness” of Jews and gypsies during the 1930s.

If this “coalition of elected officials” is, as Mr. Ball contends, “focused on drunk driving,” why aren’t they also denouncing such native-born offenders as Michael Rights, who, despite two D.W.I. convictions, is still allowed behind the wheel of a car ? (To my mind, the sight of Mr. Rights leading that anti-drunk driving march in Brewster last summer is the ultimate in hypocrisy.) And if, as his apologist Donna Shkrell maintains, Mr. Ball’s achievements in Albany including “calling attention to (as opposed to doing anything about ?) dangerous loop-holes in sexual predator laws,” how is it one of his own girl-friends had to get a court order to finally put an end to his stalking and harassing her?

The kindest “spin” that can be put on such bald-faced contradictions is that Assemblyman Ball wants his constituents to believe what he says (and says, and says) but NOT what he does. As someone who once publicly defended Mr. Ball -- in these very pages -- my answer is: “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.”

To the Tea Party, who’ll be swilling his beer and cheering his latest rant on the 24th, and to my fellow voters who are responsible for sending Assemblyman Ball to Albany in the first place, I put the following question: how many of us are still so gullible as to be fooled—yet again—into returning him there in November ?

Dr. Richard France Lake Carmel