Man, I gotta tell you. When I read letters like the ones by Mr. Driscoll and Mr. Stockinger in the Herald last week, it just makes me feel tired all over.

When a person is so blinded by their ideology that the truth is not recognizable to them, it is a sad thing.

Mr. Driscoll is all upset by what Mr. Trump does not say, so he presumes to tell us what Mr. Trump means by what he does say. He would rather hear lies spoken in plain English than truths left unsaid, because he will be offended by those truths.

Mr. Stockinger  gives his address as Poulsbo but I think it should be somewhere closer to Fantasyland. One of his statements I found so ridiculous it boggled my mind just to try to think where he could come up with such a perspective. I am talking about his statement that in his America an illegal immigrant involved in a drunken driving fatality and released because he has no previous infractions does not mean that there is a murderous illegal immigrant running around looking to kill someone else. Please allow me to shine the light of truth in the direction of Mr. Stockinger.

Sen. Grassley of Iowa demanded from Immigration and Customs Enforcement the statistics on illegal-immigrant crime. They do not make these statistics public, as far as I can determine. However, the senator received this information, which he shared with the media.

In 2013-14, ICE released 66,565 illegals who have more than 166,877 convictions among them: 30,000 for DUI, 414 for kidnapping; 11,301 for rape or other assaults, 395 for homicide.

Some 2,423 of those released have since been convicted of new crimes. Between 2010-14, 122 illegals who had committed crimes and were released committed murder.

Now, I don’t know whether or not Mr. Stockinger’s felon was among these statistics or not, but I do know that if they are telling us these kinds of numbers for illegal criminal activity, then I think it’s a safe bet that it’s the tip of the iceberg. You can put on the rose- colored glasses and continue to support politicians who are known liars and terrorist sympathizers, or you can enter the real world and become concerned about the security of our country and. by extension, the whole world.

Let me say, in conclusion, I do not know for a fact what Mr. Trump will do as president and I’m pretty sure no one reading this does, either. However, I do know from the record accumulated by his opponent that, if she is  elected, we will be lied to at every turn. Just yesterday she called the FBI director a liar for saying that she had sent classified e-mails. Everybody is a liar but her, even though she has a public record of blatant lying stretching back for more than three decades.

Ideologues, however, never clutter their beliefs with facts. They just plod along because they have believed a certain way, and that’s all they care to know.

Henry Carnes
Poulsbo