LETTER: Shannon has no substance

I was taken aback by the rantings of Michael Shannon directed towards Creigh Deeds. While this is no attempt to endorse Mr. Deeds, I do feel the need to defend the man as a human being. Mr.
Shannon rambles about discussing the Washington Post and its support of the candidate and dismisses it as merely a good look at a GPS system.

He follows the first few paragraphs of his diatribe with countless country boy insults and demeaning comments with regard to Mr. Deed’s character and intelligence, all based on the fact that he comes
from Bath County, speaks slowly and has an affection for the more down-to-earth things in life.

The highlight of the wasted space on your opinion page is when he tries to say that Mr. Deed’s story of leaving home with $80 is somehow misguided and incorrect.

He does so by trying, albeit poorly, to say that the money (four twenty-dollar bills) that Mr. Deeds left home with in 1976 would be worth $224 in today’s money. He is imploring the time value of money
and the supposed appreciation of Mr. Deed’s money over the given time period. He does admit that he is no economist and that is blaringly evident. He also says that this shows that Democrats don’t
know anything about money. While I am quite sure that Mr. Deeds was not appealing to the “my-parents-spent-$100,000-to-send-me-to-school-for-six-years-so-that-I-could-graduate-with-an-English-degree-
and-write-on-the-opinion-page crowd,” I have to believe that what he was trying to put across is that expenses are out of hand and we need to get a handle on them.

To call the story “Lame” only goes to accentuate the point that Mr. Shannon has virtually no idea what it is like to embark on an underfunded educational journey in which you don’t know how you’re going
to purchase the next text book or pay your rent in a given month!

That’s the point! Mr. Shannon employs the oldest of GOP tricks, which is to insult a lot of people, to show that he can use the Internet, thus further proving his superiority to Mr. Deeds, and to pepper his
writing with some type of fictional science in an effort to hide the fact that he really has nothing of substance to say.

By the way, four twenty-dollar bills were four twenty-dollar bills in 1976 and are the same four twenty-dollars bills today.

MICHAEL MATTHEWS

Manassas