Since Robert Graef chooses to use the editorial page of The Arlington Times as his bully pulpit from which to attack The Heritage Foundation, I would hope that The Times would allow a response. I am sure that his intentions are of the purest, after all, he does protest with the implied statement of “can’t we all just get along?” While he recognizes that there are those of us out there in the conservative arena, I fear that he would prefer we kept our opinions to ourselves and did not seek to impose them on him and his more liberal colleagues.

Mr. Graef states that “we have a new president who has the intelligence, poise, wisdom and people skills to guide the reform of an ailing economy and foreign policy.” What he conveniently leaves out of that equation is the word “experience”. Never, in the history of this country have we elected a president so totally lacking in experience for this high office. This, during a time of financial crisis, two wars and a Muslim world in such upheaval.

Mr. Graef alludes to “dark forces” that are at work to undo President Obama’s administration. We conservatives are not the dark forces to which Mr. Graef refers. Those dark forces exist within the very party that President Obama represents. How many of those nomnated for cabinet positions from within President Obama’s own party have come under scrutiny for their failure to pay their taxes?

A reference is made to a statement by Rush Limbaugh to the effect that “I hope he fails.” Anyone familiar with the comments of Mr. Limbaugh knows that he hopes that President Obama’s liberal policies fail which is the desire of all of us on the conservative side. We are are fearful of the direction in which President Obama and, yes, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, will take this country if they have their way. However, it is so convenient to take just those four words and distort them as a way of portraying conservatives as those dark forces at work in the country.

So far, it is not the conservatives who are causing problems for President Obama. It is the liberal majority that exists within the House and Senate which will be his undoing. The House, led by Speaker Nancy Pelosi, has passed without any Republican support and, I might add, without allowing any Republican input, a stimulus package which is filled with so much pork that it is opposed by a plurality of Americans by a 43 to 37 percent margin.

Now, let us address what Mr. Graef refers to as that group (The Heritage Foundation) which wants to control your opinions. Anyone who followed the recent election campaign of Senator Barack Obama knows that the mainstream media did everything in its power, even to the extent of getting “shivers up their legs” as Chris Matthews of MSNBC said, to ignore anything that might have raised questions about his qualifications.

The American people elected an individual about whom it knew, virtually, nothing but who had charm, charisma, a good looking family and could use a teleprompter better than his opponent. They completely overlooked or were told to overlook his associations and his background. Driving the effort was ACORN (a far-left radical group being investigated for voter fraud) which was slated to receive millions, if not billions in the stimulus package and billionaire George Soros and his left-wing Moveon.org which, according to Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican, “Moveon.org’s civil action committee could receive stimulus funds such as money earmarked for energy ‘activities’, since MoveOn.org lists one of its goals to ‘reduce’ America’s dependence on oil.”

The Heritage Foundation concerns itself with many issues, from missile defense for Europe to public administration, and about 20 other subject areas. It regularly publishes comprehensive articles, papers, journals, etc., expressing its strong neo-conservative opinions in these subject areas. While the Foundation has contributed many ideas and positions on contemporary public policy, it is best known for the support generated by its foreign policy analysts in the 1980s and early 1990s to provide military and other support to anti-communist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Angola, Cambodia, Nicaraugua and other nations, a policy that came to be known as the Reagan Doctrine.

The Foundation ultimately succeeeded in this effort, winning both covert and overt United States support for so-called “wars of liberation” against Soviet-aligned states around the world. Critics argued that this effort led to undue bloodshed in the Third World and damaged American relations with the former Soviet Union. Supporters have argued that the cost imposed on Moscow by such efforts was huge, leading to the beginning of the end for the imperial Soviet empire. Whatever the truth, it was the first prominent example of The Heritage Foundation’s ability to spark global debate and alter fundamentally the course of American policy.

Especially during these times, the country needs an organization such as The Heritage Foundation to remind us that the America for which our ancestors fought and died is being threatened by a liberal political establishment with an agenda that runs contrary to that of our founders.

Frank Barden