Letters to Patients
Posted on internet: Tue, 5 Aug 2008 23:34:00 -0700 (PDT)
Dear Mrs. DeRose:
I saw your publicly posted letter to your congressional representatives.
Your efforts to suggest that my recent column on Lyme disease was the product of federal dollars, federal time, and federal employment are deceitful. Why was it necessary to repeatedly try to identify me as a “permanent federal employee,” a “public employee,” a “federal employee in charge of the public’s health,” a “lifetime appointment to the public payroll,” and a “civil servant and federal employee?” Or to state that my part-time hobby as a freelance writer is being underwritten by taxpayer dollars? Are you a fool or just a liar?
I work for the Fed 40 hours a week, five days a week. The rest of my time and my life are my own. What I do in my house on Saturday morning or on vacation is not the business of the federal bureaucracy or you.
As for my column being “plastered all over the internet,” well, that’s the work of LymeNut members and, by extension, you for posting your letter, which will likely encourage others to read the column and pass it around. As far as I know, my column is posted to the web site of the paper, which usually requires a subscription or fee to access. Don’t blame me for circulating a paragraph of something you didn’t happen to like. Complain to LymeNut and the Lyme Mafia.
As a “historian” you should know the value of references and other source material in writing. You didn’t include any in your letter. Would you mind providing me and other readers with some dates and examples of my having “repeatedly insulted many members of the Lyme community?” Also, who are the members of the “Lyme community?” Some examples of my “insulting rhetoric” also would be helpful, as well as some examples of where on the Internet I “spread” this rhetoric. Finally, you should quickly write to your congressional reps to tell them your earlier reference to my having no work is five years old and not a current event. (What bothers you more as a taxpayer, that five years ago I had little day-to-day work in the bureaucracy “ironically caused by a Lyme activist” or that I had the nerve to ask for more work?)
I doubt the Congress has any interest in investigating what I do in my house after work. What I do at work has been investigated. Check with Senator Grassley’s office if you’re curious. If I was doing anything illegal or inappropriate, be assured that I can indeed be fired. I’m not a federal judge. I don’t have a lifetime appointment.
Good luck with converting that ABD to PhD. Mind if I send a copy of your letter to your committee members? I still know a few profs at the U. of Maine, including a dean.
Edward McSweegan, Ph.D.
http://sci.tech-archive.net/Archive/sci.med.diseases.lyme/2008-08/msg00029.html