To the editor:

In his Nov. 16 letter headlined, “RI voters do not seem able to get it”, the writer berates the voters of Rhode Island’s Congressional District 1 (CD1) for electing Gabe Amo rather than Colonel Gerry Leonard USMC (retired).

The writer touts Colonel Leonard’s military record and “service before self and principles over politics” as criteria that we voters in CD1 should have used in determining the better candidate.

As a veteran myself, I was impressed with Colonel Leonard’s military experience and honor his service. It appears that he was, to use an Army (my branch) slang “strac troop”—a well organized, squared away soldier. But is that, in itself, enough to vote for him? I don’t pretend to know what Colonel Leonard might have done had he, rather than Amo, been elected to our CD1 congressional seat. Unfortunately, he ran as a Republican, and it is quite evident, quite public what those congressional Republican “crazies” have been up to.

In his letter, the writer provides his clichéd, hackneyed definition of insanity. Perhaps a better definition can be found in the Republican House’s personnel and their behaviors — the ousting of Speaker Kevin McCarthy; the installation of Mike Johnson who hopes to make the United States a “Christian nation” (separation of church and state be damned); Congressman Chip Roy, a Republican, recently complained that his colleagues have done nothing; there is that mendacious fraud George Santos, the vaping, boyfriend groping Lauren Boebert, the AR15 toting Marjorie Taylor Green, the grandstanding Matt Gaetz, the hypocritical Jim Jordan and his buddy Comer.

Why would the voters of Rhode Island’s CD1 add one more Republican (albeit perhaps an honorable one) to this level of insanity? Why would we add another potential GOP sycophant who might be sympathetic to Trump’s fascist, dictatorial, totalitarian crazy talk? Why should we take that chance? The letter writer chides the voters and displays the arrogance of a person who thinks he knows better than the majority electorate.

Sound familiar?

By electing Amo, the voters of CD1 have endorsed the Constitution, democracy, the rule of law, and personal freedoms. Well done, CD1 voters, we have together rejected the uninformed, the misinformed, the naive, the cowardly and complicit Putin-loving crazies of MAGA world.

Jim Manchester
Bristol