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‘Lite’ brought out
the good, bad and ugly

So far, reaction to my column this week alleging that 26 Kaneohe Marines and a Pearl Harbor sailor did not die in vain in Iraq and referring to U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy as a "hypocritical pompous bloated toad" is running 90 percent in favor of the column and 10 percent in favor of me being a big fat idiot who ought to leave the country.

Actually, to be completely accurate, I called Kennedy the "pathetic black sheep of both the Kennedy family and America in general" and a "hypocritical pompous toad politician." And in retrospect, that probably was a little over the top. Name-calling is a fine art, and I probably could have made my point going either with the "pathetic black sheep" characterization or the "pompous toad" reference singularly. A long-standing member of Congress does deserve some respect.

But I was angry that Kennedy said in a national speech (international, actually) that America's military was at fault in Iraq just a day after 27 Hawaii troops were killed in a helicopter crash while preparing that country for its first free elections since, well, ever.

The column generated more mail than the time several years ago when I made fun of mo-peds. ("Honolulu Lite" historians will recall that it was the mo-ped column that resulted in my first column-related death threat, a note written in a pathologically disturbed scrawl threatening to blow me away with a .357 Magnum for poking fun at this disturbed individual's preferred choice of transportation.)

Unlike the mo-ped mail, most of the Kaneohe Marines column was positive and, thanks to the Internet, came from as far away as Japan and Florida. One reader said the column "made me cry," which I'm not sure is a good thing for a humor column.

The small percentage of mail attacking column (and columnist) was not homicidal, but predictably pathological (you could actually hear the writers' teeth grinding as you read the text).

"It's arrogant 'americans' like you that make people hate the real America. You are unpatriotic and bad for the country. Please leave," wrote one severely agitated reader. (And remember, this was merely for suggesting that my neighbors across Kaneohe Bay had not died in vain.)

Why people who hate the military, hate President Bush and hate all the "red" states are constantly asking everyone else (i.e., the majority) to leave the country I don't quite get.

Another reader suggested "the blood of the soldiers are (sic) on your hands." Well. OK. That seems a little harsh for someone who merely suggested that Iraqis are better off now than under a murdering dictator. I would have rather we caught Osama bin Laden before going into Iraq, but now that we are there, at least Iraqis are free of Saddam and are on their way to democracy. Can I have the freedom of all those people who won't now be killed by Saddam on my hands, too?

One reader was angry that I referred to Ted Kennedy's fleeing a car crash at Chappaquiddick in 1969 and leaving a young woman to drown. He called the Chappaquiddick incident "rather irrelevant to the fact that our men and women in uniform have been dying in Iraq for the past two years."

Another wrote, "Ted Kennedy is man enough to speak the truth to the hopelessly mendacious."

Both are wrong. Until Kennedy "speaks the truth" about the Chappaquiddick affair, he is a hypocrite, a cad and bounder. (Those were the nicest words I could come up with.) There is no statute of limitations on commentary on the death and cover-up of an innocent woman, even one misguided enough to get into a car with Ted Kennedy after he's had a snootful.

I can hear the teeth grinding already.