Well-deserved salute to Veterans Day

Kudos to Newsday for honoring World War II veteran Mortimer Roberts at the Town of Huntington’s annual Veterans Day ceremony with an article and his photo ["Huntington honors vets at limited event," News, Nov. 9]. I believe Roberts does a splendid job representing the Northport American Legion Post 694 on the town’s Veterans Advisory Board, especially as he continues to serve at age 94.

Bill Ober,

Huntington

Editor’s note: The writer is chairman of the Town of Huntington Veterans Advisory Board.

On Nov. 11, Veterans Day, we honor and salute all past and present who answered the call and fought for our country ["Looking back on serving," Act2, Nov. 8]. We owe them our thanks, but, more than that, we owe them our freedom. Veterans never gave up on America, and we shouldn’t give up on them.

Lou Walker,

Cape Coral, Florida

Let’s keep electoral system we have

The partisan take "No. 270: Code breaking the Electoral College," to me, is missing critical facts [Opinion, Nov. 8]. The United States is technically a constitutional republic, not a pure democracy. As such, the Founders had tremendous foresight in not allowing the most populous states to elect presidents on a simple majority. At the same time, I believe to suggest those states somehow still do not have major impact on legal and policy matters is factually inaccurate. Those states have the majority of electoral votes and a majority of House members while, at the same time, have the dominion to rule over themselves. All of the other elections in the op-ed are local in nature, and I see it as an insult to your audience to compare a presidential election to that of a homecoming king and queen and Long Island’s best pizza. We don’t need a system that shows "campaign love." We need one that continues to support the framework of our constitutional republic.

Adam Feinberg,

Oceanside

O’Reilly misreads Trumpism’s appeal

William F.B. O’Reilly is taking liberties with the truth, starting with his very first sentence: "It wasn’t a fluke — 2016, that is". It most certainly was a fluke — a fluke of the Electoral College, which is an inherently undemocratic system. He fancies the Republican Party as the "lunch pail party" by hoping Blacks will break away "just as the white working class has done." In effect, he’s conceding Republicans have become a white man’s party. Similarly, the Hispanic vote he hopes for has always been up for grabs. George W. Bush got 44% of it in 2004. The real enemy is cultural diversity, but O’Reilly shouldn’t conflate that with progressivism’s economic agenda. He is awed by President Donald Trump’s demagoguery because it serves his cultural purposes. The great champion of economic justice isn’t the party that passed a $1 trillion tax bill, where 90% of the benefits went to the very rich. Populist economics seeks to level the hierarchy of money and remains Democrats’ best chance of reversing the last 50 years of Republican reactionary-ism.

Keith Grubman,

Bellmore

I found William F.B. O’Reilly’s op-ed off base. Trumpism is here to stay, but it’s not for the everyman. Last time, voting for Donald Trump for president correlated with wealth, and even his working-class support tended to be wealthy for their area, according to The Washington Post. To me, Trump is a rich man posing as an everyman; his movement, full of boat parades and trucks that cost more than BMWs, is emblematic of this. This framing is a longtime Republican strategy, trying to frame the dominant culture as the counterculture, and say our bosses are the voice of the working class. Most of us are tired of it, especially when the marginalized groups mentioned are disproportionately poor. How beholden Democrats are to the rich doesn’t compare to how the GOP is, and its history of union-breaking and destroying the social safety net shows that. Furthermore, elected Democrats oppose that influence whereas Trumpism wants to further grind down the poor. Sorry, Republicans are still the man, and only the media’s bias toward the man keeps this narrative alive.

Matthew Anderson,

Long Island City

William F.B. O’Reilly raises interesting issues about Trumpism and the Republican Party. It would be a mistake for blue-collar people to support the GOP or Trumpism. The only policy adopted during his term was the tax law, which benefited the rich and the corporations. It produced a deficit of $1 trillion annually. President Donald Trump has attempted to remove the Affordable Care Act and has gutted environmental regulations. To me, the GOP uses cultural issues to deflect from its policies that benefit corporations. O’Reilly fails to mention the minimum wage, health care, a ban on assault weapons, and climate change. Oh, the GOP has denied climate change.

John Boughal,

Bayport