I’m sure many of us remember the guest columnist from a while back, Dan Shannon – you know, the smartest man in the phone booth.

Well, Dan contacted me last year and told me he was writing a book about his columns and asked my permission to use my letters, at least some of them in this book. If I remember correctly, he said it was going to be a comical take on our exchange. Well, nothing could be further from the truth.

To begin with, to call what he wrote a book is laughable; it’s not much more than a pamphlet and it is also nothing more than an ode to Dan and his opinions, with some explanation as to how he arrived at those opinions.

Also, why he asked to use my letters is totally unclear as the only quote from me in the whole 118 pages, with very large print, by the way, was my labeling of him as the smartest man in the phone booth, and he didn’t even credit me with it.

He sites his education as a lawyer for instilling in him the idea of critical thinking and I applaud him for encouraging all of us to use that ability, however, as, I think, many of us who read his columns would agree, he used lawyerese, my word, to quote the facts and then in true lawyer fashion, put a lawyers spin on those facts to make his presupposed opinions seem plausible. This was challenged by me and some other readers on almost a weekly basis but there are no challenges here, just a continual spewing of his preformed opinions regarding our current president, blaming him for every ill that our country faces today, while giving him no credit whatsoever for the many achievements of this administration. I can only guess that he is a supporter of the orange bloviator who sat in the oval office before Biden, who tried to do nearly all of the things that Dan accuses our current president of doing and, given another chance, we may find we no longer have a democracy to hold onto. Trump has made it crystal clear that he will use the power of his office to persecute his enemies and pardon all of the people, under his direction, that were convicted of insurrection and sedition. Dan has proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt that, even though he has retired from the practice of law, he will always spin the facts to defend his opinions. And the price printed on this “book,” $19.99 LOL. Just sayin’

Larry Benson

Enumclaw