I got a response back from Senator Gaylord Kent Conrad which admitted that he didn’t know the context of Rush Limbaugh’s comments, so apparently he was simply being a good Democrat so he could continue to receive the over 90% of his out-of-state campaign contributions. You can read the post about his response letter here.
I just got my response from Senator Dorgan in the mail. He maintains that Rush Limbaugh was critical of soldiers who disagree with the war…no problem there, we’ll just have to disagree. To his credit, the letter contained the following: “However, in retrospect, I wish we had not started down this road of having the Senate involved in expressing support or opposition to various kinds of speech.” Later on he says, “…I think it would have been better had the Senate not rushed to express itself on either of these issues involving Moveon.org or Rush Limbaugh. Frankly, there will always be people on all sides of controversial issues that say things we might object to, but I think we should not have started down that road.”
While Senator Conrad gave me some sort of nonsense answer and apparently stuck to his guns on the issue, at least Senator Dorgan agrees that the Senators participating in the letter should not have done so. He’s not afraid to say so in a letter to one of his constituents. We’ll just agree to disagree on the intent of the comment on the radio that started it all. I’m fine with that.
Case closed, I suppose. I wish that our state’s Senate delegation had not signed on to the letter in the first place. It seems that only half that delegation can at least own up to it and say it was the wrong thing to do.