There’s been a lot of right-wing blather on the Sun Journal editorial page recently, for which I’m grateful. (Please respond; I get to shoot back.) My thoughts:

• President Bill Clinton left a budget surplus. President George W. Bush started two wars and initiated a voter-pandering Medicare prescription benefit without raising taxes. In other words, he printed hundreds of billions of dollars. So let’s be fair about spreading the blame.

• Fox News does not have a monopoly on the “truth.” The New York Times, CNN and NPR told me Obama’s poll numbers were falling, his health care reform proposal is divisive, the economy bedevils his every move, and his administration’s attempts to reverse the Bushies’ intelligence-gathering failures have a long way to go. That’s the truth.

• Despite Fox’s relentless, analysis-free sloganeering — “comfort food” for mouth-breathing ideologues — Obama does not always govern like a liberal. If he did, why are so many Democrats dismayed at the troop buildup in Afghanistan and the compromises he’s endorsed in the health care reform debate?

• With the “public option” apparently as dead as Sen. Olympia Snowe’s moderate reputation, “government-run health care” is out, no matter what the hysterical bleating from Fox that masquerades as “populism.”

• Fulminators who don’t like Obama should blame themselves. They’re the ones who helped re-elect the worst president in history. Who wouldn’t want change after him?

Dave Griffiths, Mechanic Falls