Dear Editor
The March 16 issue of the News-Optimist featured a column by Saskatchewan's own Murray Mandryk, "Link improvement too little, too late," which provides an example of how Mandryk can pretend to be an objective journalist while fulsomely lauding his chosen right-wing heroes, and damning those bad, bad other guys with faint praise - in this case, the recent "improvement" and "modicum of success" of the NDP's Dwain Lingenfelter. Mandryk suggests "Many clearly won't see past the history."
He refers, of course, to the history of the NDP government in the time after 1991 when the right-wing Grant Devine government had left the province into a monumental financial mess. In nine years, the Devine government had managed to lower the province's excellent credit rating under the previous NDP to near zero - close to bankruptcy - while driving up the provincial debt to five times what it had been before Devine's Conservatives became the government.
Mandryk seems to assume the voters have such short memories about "the history" that they can't remember why the NDP government had to take some rather draconian measures to bring the province out of that financial morass to the series of balanced budgets and financial respectability it had before the Wall government came in.
Maybe we should hope the idea that those who don't remember history are bound to repeat it, isn't always true.
Russell Lahti
Battleford
