Dan Shannon was, or is, a lawyer — and a lawyer is a sophist who twists the facts to fit their narrative.

Dan Shannon is very good at being a lawyer. In some of his previous columns he has done exactly that — in every instance his “facts” have been used to make liberals to look bad and conservatives to look good.

That is what opinion writers like him do; they twist the facts to make their points seem reasonable. This is what broadcasters like FOX News and others like them do; they twist the facts and in some cases they just blatantly lie to make their point.

As a matter of fact when FOX News was taken to court to call these practices into question, their lawyers argued— successfully I might add — that no reasonable person would be expected to believe anything they heard on FOX News to be true.

The unfortunate thing about that statement is that not very many reasonable people choose to watch or listen to FOX News. That’s exactly why we have all these unreasonable people supporting Trump and his minions.

Now to the other point of Robert Linger’s letter praising Shannon, that Rich Elfers doesn’t do his homework or check his facts (“Put Mr. Shannon in full time,” published March 2): Elfers, in my opinion, tailors his opinion to fit the facts, which he is very good at presenting, and not the other way around, as where Dan Shannon tailors the facts to fit his opinion.

That said, I would not have a problem with “The Smartest Man in the Phone Booth’s” column being a regular thing — it would give me something to poke full of holes every week instead of just once a month. That seems to be the big difference between us liberals and those conservatives; we want to hear the other sides opinion so we can reasonably contest it, the other side just wants us to shut up because their opinion should be the only one heard.

We should all know what that is called — propaganda, plain and simple. Just take a look at the countries where that is the case: they are all dictatorships. It is so disheartening to me that people like Tucker Carlson will say and do anything to increase their ratings while aiding and abetting people like Trump to destroy our democracy.

We might remember that Trump praised China’s leader being appointed president for life and said that maybe the U.S. could do something like that. Just sayin’.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw