Thanks for your thoughtful response.

You are right that my post is incomplete and makes a lot of assumptions of the reader. It is really just an outline and introduction to a much deeper series of essays I am preparing. I posted it because my thoughts are precisely on topic as a response to Curlee’s article.

My schedule is kind of hectic the next couple of days, I will try to address your comments in more detail soon.

But for now, let me quickly explain what I meant by “red-baiting” because I think that is the one point that a reader should know upon and can in fact act upon.

“Red baiting” is a scurrilous and cowardly act. It refers to the process of accusing someone of being a communist or socialist or marxist as a means of discrediting him or her politically.

This is always done without offering any evidence that the person is in fact communist or that the target’s ideas are not worthy of discussion regardless of political affiliation.

It is simply an attempt to garner power by innuendo and rumour.

There is a sad period of American history, peaking and then finally ending in the 1940s and 1050s with Senator Joe McCarthy holding hearings in the Senate parading people, many if not most of them Californians, and good Californians at that, insinuating that they are Communist and Anti-American and destroying their careers.

Today, this is seen as nothing more than a witch-hunt and is seen as one of the most shameful episodes of American political history.

Shameful, but it is far from forgotten. That is why it is odd that locals, in their attempt to build a political consensus outside their local area, or even inside their local area, would stoop so low.

For Americans, there is no lower one can stoop politically then red-baiting, yet we are seeing a revival spurred on by the likes of Glen Beck on TV and others in the media, and picked up on by local farmers and their advocates such as Don Curlee, much to their discredit.

And discredit it is, ,make no mistake about it.

We can all see and hear “red baiting” when it happens, and it is happening increasingly.

Your task as a listener is to associate anyone using such tactics with the truly unAmerican and thoroughly discredited Senator Joe McCarthy, and ask why anyone would use such a technique?

Ask yourself as a listener, or a reader, if that is the best chance of persuasion that the speaker of writer has.

If it is, then you should immediately discredit the rest of the argument, because the speaker/writer’s true intentions are already revealed – to associate with rumor-mongerers and innuendo-makers in a grab for power and influence.

If it is not the best method of persuasion, then you should also discredit the rest of the argument because there is never any need for red-baiting rumor-mongering when making a solid argument – the red-baiting only distracts from a good case, it never helps it.

So there is never any good reason to engage in red-baiting.

I also want to touch on your question about transparency here.

This is a multi-faceted issue as well, but with regards to red-baiting, the typical Valley political position is one of self-sufficiency and free markets. The legacy of Ronald Reagan if you will.

They will also preach that, in government matters, less is better, and that what government there is should be transparent. Meaning ordinary citizens should be able to access all matters of government for whatever reason they want to.

But their own practices, they (local folks involved in politics, not just politicians) engage in rumor-mongering and innuendo of the most scurrilous type know to America. The long and short of it is, they don’t practice what they preach.

So that is another reason to discredit them completely, even if the topic they are discussing is important to discuss, as it certainly was in the case of the Curlee article.