Chris Quilter Criticizes Gene Felder

Chris Quilter Criticizes Gene Felder
See “Reading the Wikipedia article a bit further…” letter-to-the-editor which was published December 21, 2007 in the Laguna Beach Independent.

Editor:
Re “Baghdad is safer than New York was under Democrats”:
Gene Felder doth protest too much, and not too accurately either.
The murder rate in New York City was declining for four years before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor, continued to decline during his two terms, and kept on declining after he left office in 2002. Giuliani exercises the universal right of politicians to claim credit for everything good that happens during their time in office, while blaming opponents and predecessors for everything else. Nevertheless, as the Wikipedia article cited by Mr. Felder goes on to note, “Studies found that the dramatic reduction in crime was strongly correlated with the increases in the number of police officers that started under Mayor Dinkins and continued through the Bloomberg administration.”
As for Detroit having a higher homicide rate than Baghdad, that’s the kind of science normally associated with Rush Limbaugh. In 2006, as reported in Wikipedia, the medical journal The Lancet published a peer-reviewed study that estimated there have been more than 600,000 violent deaths in Iraq from the time it was invaded and occupied through June 2006.
In September 2007, Opinion Research Business, an independent polling agency in London, published the results of a random, face-to-face survey of over 1500 Iraqis from 15 of 18 provinces. 22 percent said that one or more persons in their households had been killed.
I suppose one could say that the Iraqi war dead are not technically homicide victims – a distinction probably lost on them and their loved ones.
Chris Quilter
Laguna Beach