I'm on the fence as to whether to waste energy disecting Laverne Furbert's letter segment by segment as I'd originally planned, but there is one very important thing that needs pointing out here in a separate post, which highlights the dishonesty in her response.
Ms. Furbert said:
After all, it was not too long ago that he used his venom against Dr. Brown in one of his columns by using such words as “inflexible, prime misleader, wicked, weak, cagey,” etc. etc.
Ok, two things here. Firstly, one of her initial points was that she didn't read my columns, but let's not get hung up on that.
Secondly and the real issue is that there’s a, um, tiny little itty bitty, well very big fundamental act of dishonesty here.
The words 'wicked' and 'weak' jumped out at me as things I wouldn't have said. So I went back to do a word search on my RG articles and what did I find? Well Ms. Furbert pulled those from this article on GPS where 'wicked' and 'weak' were words that the taxi drivers had used about Dr. Brown, not me. I was recouting an event. Big difference. The sentence is as follows, judge for yourself:
The mistrust toward the Premier and his Deputy was palpable. Comparisons to Fidel Castro were raised, the Government was accused of running a dictatorship and Bermuda’s leaders were labeled as ‘wicked’ and ‘weak’.
Those funny things around those words are called quotes in case anyone is confused.
And it didn't stop there. 'Inflexible' appeared earlier in the same article, where I wrote that Dr. Brown would have us believe that the taxi drivers were ‘inflexible’ - not that Dr. Brown himself was inflexible. Again a big difference. But you don't have to take my word for it, here's that sentence. Judge for yourself:
"It’s not surprising then the taxi owners are wary, not inflexible, as the Minister would have you believe."
But of course those details might get in the way of a dishonest response.
Which is why of course the Editor allowed me the right of reply at publishing, because her response completely misstated my complaint into a personal attack on Derrick Burgess and contained blatant untruths. But I was only afforded a couple of hours to put together a response, which resulted in my brief and incomplete rebuttal.
