OPINION:
The late Sophie Masloff, former mayor of Pittsburgh, once told a group protesting a tax cut: “Shame on you. I did this for our children and grandchildren” (“Sophie Masloff, 1st female Pittsburgh mayor, dies,” Web, Aug. 17). Wow, Mrs. Masloff must have been the last Democrat with a conscience.
As mayor, Mrs. Masloff vetoed the wage tax and battled the special interests in order to save Pittsburgh. If you don’t think this was a feat, you can always compare Pittsburgh with Detroit. Evidently, there was never an honest Democrat to be had in a half-century in Detroit, and you end up in a shambles from just about every perspective.
In Pittsburgh, the steel industry’s decline more or less paralleled what happened to the auto industry in Detroit. Pittsburgh was a city of great wealth at one time, and Detroit was even wealthier. Mrs. Masloff called herself an “old Jewish grandmother.” Detroit’s West Side had a huge Jewish community in the 1950s and ’60s, but they all migrated north and west, into the suburbs. As an ethnic group, the Jewish community in Detroit was pretty much all gone by the ’80s.
If you think that the national Democratic Party is capable of producing another Sophie Masloff, you can always look at Hillary Clinton or Elizabeth Warren, both multimillionaires. These women would just as soon cannibalize your kids if it meant more power and money. I wonder why people can’t tell the difference between the Masloffs and the Clintons and Warrens of politics.
SAMUEL BURKEEN
Reston
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