To the editor:
Many of your readers will have recently received a hysterical plea for campaign funds from Harriet Hageman, Wyoming’s sole member of the US House of Representatives.
Hageman’s letter is a call to arms, wailing of a “WAR with the American people," the “weaponization of government," the “target on your back”," “the frontlines in the battle," “a WAR against every conservative American," and “fighting against government tyranny."
No matter how people feel about the Republican party or Donald Trump, they should reject this kind of violent rhetoric as having no place in the sober business of election to the US Congress.
Is there “a target on my back," as Ms. Hageman claims? (and getting bigger by the minute to hear her tell it). Does she need every patriot to send her $35 or more “in the next 48 hours” or all is lost? What self-aggrandizing nonsense!
She won her seat with 70% of the vote in 2022. Republicans out-register Democrats 6:1 in Wyoming. There’s probably not a single seat in the US House less in need of panicked campaign contributions than this one.
There was a time when Ms. Hageman was a respected Wyoming attorney - an honorable member of the legal profession - articulate, hard-working, well-informed, capable of presenting a well-reasoned argument, subject to professional constraints on ethics and evidence.
She knows that words matter. Yet she chooses to foment the threats of war, targets, weaponization, and guns in hopes of whipping up campaign donations.
Harriet, yours are the kind of words that moved Timothy McVeigh to blow up 170 folks, including the kids in daycare, at the federal center in Oklahoma City.
Anyone inclined to respond to Hageman’s over-the-top solicitation should only do so under the strict condition that she de-militarize her campaign rhetoric and get down to the important business of thoughtfully representing the great state of Wyoming.
In these troubled times, we need statesmen, not bomb-throwers; fire fighters, not arsonists.
- Bern Hinckley
Laramie
