As you may know, the Herald Courier can get pretty desperate for letters to the editor at certain times of the year. But I hope we never get this desperate.
Shortly after Jan. 7, the day President Bush announced his latest tax-cut proposal, we received a letter from an Illinois resident voicing support for the plan and hailing it as evidence of Bush’s leadership.
Just a few hours later, we received another from someone in the Richmond vicinity voicing support for the plan and hailing it as evidence of Bush’s leadership. If this last sentence prompted you to ask, “Haven’t I just read this?” then you know just how the second letter struck me. In fact, I compared the two, word for word; except for the names and hometowns at the bottom, they were identical.
IN ALL, I GOT the same letter from eight people over a week and a half; a couple of the letters did come with an extra sentence. Half were from this area, and half weren’t. Out of curiosity, I ran an Internet search to see if any newspapers had actually published the letter. By the middle of last week, at least a dozen had — including the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Boston Globe and even the International Herald Tribune in Paris.
BY TOM TOMORROW