Liberal bias invades (Macon) Telegraph, July 22, 2018

For years, I’ve been puzzled by the widespread perception that The Telegraph displayed liberal bias. I thought that, if anything, it leaned conservative. While the news coverage was politically neutral, the opinion columns were overwhelmingly conservative. In recent months, however, The Telegraph has indeed developed a liberal slant. The evidence:
1. The conservative opinion columns have mostly disappeared.
2. The editorial cartoon is, virtually every day, a bitter attack on President Trump. While he often certainly does open himself up to criticism, he isn’t the only one who deserves lampooning or lambasting, and the monotonous drumbeat of daily attacks is highly partisan and biased.
3. Eastern Seaboard newspapers The New York Times and The Washington Post have largely replaced the more Middle American Associated Press as news sources. While I believe those are excellent newspapers, they are widely abhorred among conservatives, so their embrace by The Telegraph amounts to a slap in the face to conservative readers and almost seems calculated to drive them away.
4. The coverage of the governor’s race has been markedly slanted toward the Democrats. The story reporting the May 22 primaries began with the Democratic primary and didn’t even mention the Republican contest until deep into the story (this despite the fact that the Democratic primary is largely meaningless in deeply red Georgia). This was followed the next day by a long, glowing article about Democrat Stacey Abrams; I’ve seen nothing similar about any of the Republican candidates.— David Mann, Macon

Willy Bean: David Mann. conservative columnists and letter writers have disappeared from our local paper and not of their own volition!

David Mann: Thanks, Willy. I think the reason is that the Opinion page, on every day except Sunday, is now being put together by California-based McClatchy and simply inserted into all its newspapers, thus on every day except Sunday it consists entirely of canned wire copy of no particular relevance to Middle Georgia. I suspect this was driven by economic necessity rather than ideology, and what bothers me most is The Telegraph’s hypocrisy about it, such as the April 25 front-page article headlined “Amid changes, The Telegraph remains intensely local and focused on serving Middle Georgia,” written by a Columbus-based McClatchy executive. That executive recently left McClatchy! And there’s reason to believe he was either laid off or quit because he was tired of being paid to lie.

As it happens, an important part of my letter above was cut, and I’ve written a follow-up letter about that. And more bias appears on today’s (Sunday’s) front page! Here’s the letter I will soon submit:

THE BIAS GOES ON

“Thank you for printing my letter, ‘Liberal bias invades Telegraph,’ on July 22. But the conclusion of the letter, which I believe was important, was cut, whether for space or because it 'hit too close to home' I cannot know.

“I maintained that in recent months The Telegraph has developed a liberal slant and offered several pieces of evidence, one of them being that coverage of the governor’s race has been unbalanced, then gave examples of this. But the last and perhaps most blatant example was cut. Here is how the original letter ended (let’s see whether this makes it in this time):

“ ‘Any pretense of political neutrality was finally blown with the July 18 online story reporting Trump’s endorsement of Brian Kemp, the more conservative of the Republican runoff candidates. Whoever wrote that headline, “Trump makes endorsement in runoff for Georgia governor,” avoided even mentioning Kemp’s name! “Trump endorses Kemp in runoff for Georgia governor” would have easily fit.’

“As coincidence would have it, the front page of the same edition containing my letter carried another example of this same thing. Again in that story, headlined ‘Pence visits Macon for Ga. governor candidate,’ the headline writer refused even to mention Kemp’s name. If Kemp is elected governor, it will be partly because of the perception that media such as The Telegraph are biased and treat conservatives with contempt – a perception that helped elect Trump and that, when I hear people express it, I can no longer reply is mistaken.”


Geraldine Parker (July 23): David Mann, I was hoping to see a comment by the editors below your letter, something to say that they are truly trying to be fair and balanced as any newspaper should be, but no such thing happened. Editors of yesteryear did make a short italicized comment in their defense after someone wrote to criticize the paper. I would guess they no longer care. The Telegraph was sold recently to the McClatchy group, which is a very liberal group. They constantly print cartoons berating the president. So, from now on, expect more of the same, socialism at its finest, which will ruin the country like it has Venezuela. Our conservative voices have been drowned out by those who care NOT about our 1st Amendment rights of free speech. Such a shame.

Actually "fair and balanced" is a wrong way to report the news. Journalism is always about defending the citizen against oppressive governments, by exposing what politicians are doing wrong. It should never be about getting both sides of any story, but about keeping our country free. After all, who wants to know about the reason government leaders oppress people? We already know that reason: power and greed. Reporters should be bold enough to report that they DO such things, and leave it to the people to make their own decision on how to change their government. Anything else would be unfair and unbalanced. Half the news is no news at all. Hatred for a president doesn't solve anything.

David Mann: Thanks for your response, Ms. Parker. I was hoping for the same thing, but The Telegraph no longer ever responds to letters; those responses were written by the Opinion editor who was forced to retire earlier this year, and The Telegraph hasn’t had a real Opinion page since. It hasn’t run a single editorial since then (that editor had written all of them), and letters were cut back to a few times a week and now to Sundays only. I believe all these deleterious changes were dictated by McClatchy.

Geraldine Parker: David Mann and Willie Bean... I really think that the only solution to this socialist liberal media bias would be for level-headed conservatives to start their own newspaper. Where are the Tracy McCollisters of our day? He tried starting The Patriot, but was in too poor a health to continue. Any takers?

In "The Resurrection: Myth or Reality?” Dr. Bill Cummings’ latest column, in the Telegraph once again provides the Telegraph readership with a learned, intriguing, but woefully incomplete picture of the person of Jesus Christ.

We have, in the four Gospels, four accounts that emphasize four differing aspects of this most important person who ever lived.  In Matthew, He is the Jewish Messiah.  Mark, who is Peter’s amanuensis, emphasizes Jesus as the obedient servant of YHWH.  Luke was a gentile physician, who emphasizes Jesus’ humanity (“The Son of Man”), reflected in a genealogy traced back to Adam.  John’s gospel is the most distinctive, revealing the Christ’s true origin as the eternal “Word” of God.  There we find the most complete account of the risen Jesus as a spirit manifesting in our limited dimensionality, in somewhat the same way that a 3D cube manifests as a square in a 2-dimensional plane.  He is physical, able to eat (“…a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have”); yet possesses the ability to materialize in a 6-sided space (the “upper room”) without penetrating any of its sides.  

Jesus’ body “did not see corruption,” but it did undergo “glorification” — a transformation into an eternal state which is, at a minimum, “hyper-dimensional” to the space-time environment that we inhabit.  All believers are destined for this same transformation (1 John 3:2).  Dr. Cummings is correct in classifying them as Christ’s “body”; but a body without a head is dead.  Jesus is the head, not only of the Church, but of the Heavens and Earth of which He is the creator.  

In short Dr. Cummings chose to spread his un-blessed hope that Jesus' body rotted in an unmarked grave, but that He somehow lives through his and other heretics' self-congratulatory mutual admiration and $.02 worth of deference to an itinerant Jewish rabbi who ran afoul of the authorities.

One final note:  Mark 16:9-20 is not a “later addition”; rather, it was expunged by the gnostic-influenced Alexandrian school, and reincorporated into Textus Receptus.

W. Wade Stooksberry II

Dr. Faria: …Father McDonald of St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, myself, and others have complained to the Telegraph that we have not been allowed to answer Dr. Cummings pseudo-theological diatribes with specific rebuttals. I refer the reader to the articles below and the comments that follow in which I try to preserve all of this material chronicling and documenting these events taking place in such very colorful and interesting times:

Dr Miguel Faria responds to Mr. N.M. Cullinan's letter in the Macon Telegraph

Symposium — An anti-Christian barrage in the midst of the Middle Georgia Bible Belt?

Religious morality (and secular humanism) in Western civilization as precursors to medical ethics: A historic perspective

In your last letter Wade you have also espoused a concise scholarly theological counter argument, and I and countless others thank you.

It is incredible the Telegraph barrage still continues, Sunday after Sunday, and with limited replies allowed, except for Mr. David Mann, who unfortunately takes one step forward and two steps back in his long critiques, needlessly declaring with false modesty that after all he is not a religious expert. His "critiques" and particularly his comments and dialogues with Dr. C. all eventually end in an apologetic tone that further detracts from this critique. I have communicated my criticism directly to Mr. Mann, who vehemently denies his intellectual capitulations.

Therefore I value your theological knowledge and thank you for sharing it with our readers. And I apologize for all these links but I thought they may provide a small counterbalance to the McClathy paper’s biased pseudo-theology and progressive political blather!

Dr. Faria: ... My wife Helen (correctly in my opinion) says that Dr. C's theology is a "Hollywood theology" based on the popular culture and Hollywood cliches, ("The Body" 2001 film trash, etc.)! ...

Wade Stooksberry: “I think Helen is right.  Dr. Cummings expresses a vague "spirituality" that I call "Whateverism": a belief in something, nothing, anything -- "whatever.”  It is the religion of Hollywood, the music industry, and the news media.  It has roots in the "de-mytholization" movement in academic Christianity, which has pervaded the seminaries of the denominational church, even the Southern Baptists (until Albert Mohler performed a housecleaning several years ago).  It is a.k.a. "the search for the historical Jesus,” by which is meant the Jesus of their secular imaginings, who -- they hope -- rotted in a grave somewhere, so they can project whatever image of him is fashionable this season upon the screens of their spurious scholarship.  When I was a freshman at Mercer, many years ago (pre-Godsey, even), the first text assigned in my required Christianity 101 class was by Rudolph Bultmann, who was at the forefront of the "historical Jesus" movement in the 19th and early 20th century -- a movement which has spawned the nefarious and extant "Jesus Seminar.”

You are free to use my letter in any way you deem appropriate, and I am honored for you to do so.

W. Wade Stooksberry II

Letter to the editor, Macon Telegraph, March 26, 2016

Interesting theology

I read and re-read many of the columns on The Telegraph's Opinion page written by Dr. Bill Cummings. The more I read the more I am driven in the trustworthiness of the truthfulness of the Bible that Dr. Cummings is disintegrating.

Surely Dr. Cummings unites himself with those whom he claims in his 12/6/15 column are "Many good 'Christian' scholars (i.e., Crossan, Borg, Spong, and Cummings) read them as parables or metaphors — but not as history." He claims that the parables mean:

1.) Jesus is not God.
2.) Jesus was not born of the Virgin Mary.
3.) Jesus' atonement on the cross does not reconcile sinful humanity to God
4.) Jesus' resurrection from the dead was not in physical form.

The Jesus Seminar that I have much information about, includes many theological educators who gather together to discuss and reach their conclusions about the Bible and especially the divinity of Christ. The seminar includes Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong, Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan and Episcopal Marcus Borg. I don't know if it includes Dr. Cummings.

I quote only a few of their biblical beliefs and proclamations. Bishop Spong says "Saint Paul was a homosexual. Jews might be safer if we took Evangelical Christianity away. The virgin birth and resurrection were not literal events."

Priest Dominic Crossan says, "The atonement of Christ is incredibly obscene and transcendental child abuse. The virgin birth is a parable. We need open heart surgery on Christianity and our culture." Episcopal Marcus Borg says, "The Bible is a human product. Ascribing it to divine inspiration leads to massive confusion. There is a very bright future to mainline churches if they understood their traditions metaphorically and not literally. Christianity is not the only way to salvation."

Many biblical traditions can be understood metaphorically but not those including the gospel of Jesus Christ and the moral absolutes people are to live. I pray for Dr. Cummings. This is not to denigrate him. If he became a born again Christian with the assurance of his salvation, he could be a mighty man of God proclaiming the gospel of Jesus Christ. I say this because in his 11/1/15 article he says, "Am I certain of my faith? No, I am not certain of my faith nor of my opinions and if I sound like I am, I apologize." — The Rev. Richard Aultman, Byron

Willy Bean: Rev. Richard Aultman, Cummings waters down the word of God until there's nothing left but water. Like the rest of us, he needs prayer.
Dr. Bill Cummings: Thank you, Willy; keep up the prayers! When I grow up, I may learn as much as Aultman!

March 27, 2016 in response on an article on the historicity of Jesus by Dr. Bill Cummings entitled "Did Jesus really exist?"

Marc Clarkson: Dr. Bart Ehrman's Jesus historicity book was near univerally panned. He is NOT a historian but a textual critic. He is going to debate Dr. Price and if he uses things like "Peter and Mary believed they saw Jesus after he was crucified" he will damage the historicity argument even further. At worst, the mythicist argument proves that the beliefs of most Christians are not based on history/fact. The argument for a historical Jesus always reduces to minutiae and trivial "facts" that get challenged at ever turn. None of the grandiose claims Christians hold have ever been defended to the best of my knowledge. Even still, most mythicists say that an agnosticism about whether Jesus existed is the best position due to the truth of his existence being lost to time (and the filter of the Christian/Roman Catholic church) barring time travel.

Dr. Bill Cummings: Thanks, Marc! I'm looking forward to this Debate on Oct.21 in Milwaukee. Both Bart and Bob are excellent scholars, and neither one is a "believer," so their arguments will be strictly historical. I can be swayed either way, I think.

Felton Swicord: Hey Doc…. your theology is as turbulent as a termite in a yo-yo. You must know time is getting shorter and it is coming down to the end. So, please don’t end up like old King Agrippa when he was coming down to the end of his journey, after hearing the Sinless Savior’s call all those years as you have, he declared,”…..ALMOST thou persuadest me to be a Christian.”(caps added Acts 26:28) So very sad!

Macon Telegraph selected intellectually meaningful comments (in response to Dr. Cumming’s article on “The Myth of Creation,” Feb. 27, 2016

Richard Scherer: Humanity has a sin nature and we seem to have had it from the very beginning. Why would a perfect being allow this to happen? He must have realized our "fall" would occur even before He created us. This contradiction bugs me.

Wade Trena-The Doves: Richard — that is a troubling one. If God is omniscient, and necessarily outside of the temporal reality that He created; and can thus see all of time and space spread before Him, as you could see an entire parade from a helicopter —then He foreknew that man would misuse the gift of free will, before He created.

Why create then? Why allow the suffering, pain, and the ultimate death that each of us faces?A very similar problem to “the problem of pain”: if God is good, and all-powerful, then why evil (and suffering and death)?

The most succinct answer to the first question I have encountered is courtesy of Ravi Zacharias: God also foreknew that a REDEEMED creation would be better than an unfallen one; i.e., that it would produce qualities that Eden (perhaps) could not: e.g., courage, fortitude, patience, and faith itself.

And Paul, through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, informs us of the tautological format of Redemption. ‘As sin entered the world through one man, and effects us all: so redemption (or justification, or salvation — whatever vocabulary you prefer) entered through one Man, and is available to all.

The answer to the second question has best been expressed — imho — by C. S. Lewis’ treatise, “The Problem of Pain.” Lewis’ profound and influential works are available “wherever books are sold”; and, of course, on the web.

I think you’ll find both more challenging, and much more informative, than the idle musings presented by Dr. Cummings. “Progressive heretic”, indeed. LOL. Hope this helps.

William Francis Cummings: Wade Trena-The Doves: hmmm. Idle musings? And what are your musings?

Wade Trena-The Doves: William Francis Cummings Well, since you ask, Bill — I muse that the problem with your perspectives is that they are hopelessly narrow and limited; and therefore superficial and simplistic.

I encourage you to consider the ramifications involved in the fact that our shared reality is dimensionally bounded — in terms of age, or time (it had a beginning); and in terms of size. It is not infinitely large, since it is not infinitely old: and, we now discover, it has limits in terms of “smallness”; our dimensional environment is composed of indivisible units, called “quanta”.

In short, we exist in a sort of “digital simulation” of a “higher reality” (Scientific American, ''The Inconstancy of Constants,'' June 2005, p. 57-63). Indeed, our cosmos is but a subset of an infinite “Metacosm”, which we refer to as “spiritual.”

This is what The Bible has maintained for over 3,500 years. Genesis provides a poetic — but true — account of that “higher reality’s” creative act in expressing our physical universe, from the contents of His “Mind” — a very important word.

An eternal (timeless) entity, with an infinite Mind: a pretty good working definition of “God” — wouldn't you agree? A universe “spoken” into existence, as it were, though His “Word” — the same Word that became flesh in the Person of Jesus Christ. I know — it’s a lot to deal with, right? (wink)

And to do so, you’d have to jettison almost all of the obsolete materialist nonsense you’ve been programmed with, and pride yourself on. As well as much of the Catholic dogma you've acquired -- and at no inconsiderable effort, I’m sure.

But it’s worth it, my dear friend. Whatever you stand to lose is worth precisely nothing, in relation to receiving the Truth, and entering into a personal relationship with it. Er, that is —HIM. God bless. WWS

Dear Miguel,

We are living in a period of darkness as society and ethics have crumbled,and the principles for which we stand are being trampled by those who do not understand what they are doing. They do not know what terrible events caused the
founders of our nation to draw up a government with protection of individual rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…

But society is growing. There are an expected 500 million projected citizens in the USA by 2050, making it the third most populous country in the world. It will be shaped by modeled technology, incredible scientific advances, and more. Unfortunately, I do not see how the economic collapse can be avoided. But the end result may be different than Russell predicts. Yes, history has shown that chaos is followed by dictatorship, but that knowledge may result in an attitude and formula that prevents catastrophe.

Right now we have a president acting as demagogue and dictator, as much as he is allowed to be. And you see the reaction of the public, anger, against the government, which I have never seen in my lifetime. Remember the Millennials are growing up with a different set of experiences than we did. So it is no wonder that they have a different perspective. In teaching and training them in surgery, they want to be independent but at the same time they realize that they need the wisdom and guidance of experience to be successful. I have seen this many times. So, that learning and adaptation do exist… it takes time for that teaching to sink in. It is “on the job” training for democracy and maturity that we see and that was not learned as we did. My father always said, “You do not need to jump off a bridge to see what it is like.” We did not jump. We knew and trusted our elders and experience. Today’s generations are jumping (i.e., with Drugs, in Communes, divorce from marriage too early, and the need to be with children to raise them… ) Generations X (post boomers, born 1960s to 1982) and Y (millennials, born between 1982 and 2000) have a great dislike for the boomers who are now 77 million strong and at an age when they are in power. That, too, will pass.

The millennials’ beginning thinking age is from 1994-2008. That is at the time of Clinton and his sex scandals, the lack of trust and lying that that represented, corruption in government, Hillary care, divorce and single parent families, liberal sex in the schools and parents who do not care about the curriculum, up thru the Bush era with the economic collapse that has continued into the present. That includes Twitter, Facebook and new ways of communication. So, comparatively their experience is far different from ours with multiple wars, cold wars and prosperity and good family values.

So they are seeing the world from a much different lenses. How can they gain unfiltered knowledge? Not by us being silent but by writing educated pieces as you have done. Millennials now prefer what they have been taught — i.e., gun control, no wars or confrontations, help the poor, take all the refugees, all of this without objective analysis of the results or where it leads — so their thinking is far different from ours. They do not have the hard knocks experience to make those judgments because they have never seen the results of acting upon those ideals. That also applies to religious values and the sexual scandals in the church and among the clergy is of not help. So, we have to judge them in the time in which they live and then figure out how to reach them. — Jim

James I. Ausman, MD, PhD, is Professor of Neurosurgery at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles (UCLA); Editor-in-Chief of Surgical Neurology International; President, Future Healthcare Strategies; Chairman of the Board, The Waymaster Corporation Productions; and Creator & Executive Producer of THE LEADING GEN® TV Series.

Let me briefly state that with Dr Bill Cummings latest Macon Telegraph column,”The blasphemy called 'atonement,' ” I believe retired judge Phil Brown owes David Mann an apology and to himself a retraction; that is, if his theological column was sincere. By attacking Mann in his confused and misguided column, Judge Brown defended something that Dr. Cummings himself does not affirm or deny, while he continues his anti-Christian barrage that I discussed above. We live in interesting times!

Father Allan J. McDonald responds to Dr. Cummings' Anti-Christian barrage in the Macon Telegraph, Jan 28, 2016

Critical historical method

Who am I to judge Dr. Bill Cummings' faith and Christianity? So I won't do that. But we can judge the method of biblical analysis to which he clings tenaciously. It is a methodology rooted in liberal Protestantism of the late 1800s called the critical-historical method. As an unbridled ideology of that period, it eventually pushed orthodox Protestants towards biblical fundamentalism and literalism by the 1920s.

Liberal Protestantism tended to deconstruct the Bible, which led to the denial of basic tenets of the historic church even to the point of denying the divinity of Christ in pursuit of the so-called historical Jesus.

When it was shown that this method could have some beneficial aspects, Catholic scholars were allowed to use the critical-historical method of interpretation by Pope Pius XII beginning in 1942. But by the 1960s many Catholic scholars were abandoning its sober approach and making some of the same disastrous mistakes of their liberal Protestant counterparts. This period of church's history is confused to say the least and heterodox Catholic academicians have pushed some Catholics toward fundamentalism as occurred in Protestantism earlier.

Pope Benedict in his book "Jesus of Nazareth" calls us to move beyond mere historical criticism to a more profoundly theological reading of scripture that does not deconstruct the historic faith and morals of the church or emasculate the divinity of Christ, although he acknowledges that a truly historical approach is necessary when used soberly. However, Pope Benedict rightfully points out the philosophical flaw that is embraced by those like Cummings when it comes to this method of biblical interpretation.

Many scholars have divorced the "Jesus of history" from the "Christ of faith." Some have also divorced the church from Christ and in doing so have severed theology and doctrine from reason and reality. Pope Benedict sees the logic of this ideology as disastrous: "Intimate friendship with Jesus, on which everything depends, is in danger of clutching at thin air." This is what Dr. Cummings does and it is truly the most unfortunate aspect of his use of the critical historical method applied to the Bible in an unbridled 1960s way.-- Father Allan J. McDonald is the distinguished Pastor at St. Joseph's Catholic Church in Macon, Georgia

Dr. Faria,

Only on rare instances do I read the Macon Telegraph (MT) anymore. When I have checked the comments to letters feature it is pretty much the same stuff indistinguishable from one month to another. It seems the MT Viewpoints to have been taken over by a cabal of far leftists, with the exception of a couple of conservatives who have not yet abandoned the forum. In the beginning one lawyer amongst them, while obviously liberal, could be engaged somewhat academically. But at the point he asserted any disagreement with the meme was racist, any contrary commentary became pointless. It is interesting that his cohorts declare that he has won the debate of OPINION by virtue of being a lawyer.

Then we have the very angry fellow from somewhere around Atlanta that can’t let go of centuries old grudges, and another that professes to work with conservatives that, of course, are more open-minded than Viewpoints writers who are generally targets of sarcastic barbs. There is also the well-known troll from Chicago with a psychosis (am I practicing without a license?) who should simply be ignored.

And then there is Sandefur. What an angry, vitriolic individual! I recall a comment of his wherein he commented that he was threatened with a beating from his classmates for refusing to use the N word. I grew in a small town in a rural county, more black than white, and that word was not common usage, and in fact, my mother taught her children not to use such language. It would dis-ingenuous of me to say it was not used by some, but Sandefur overstates the use to make some point. I say the above to say this: Given his demeanor [bullying] on the MT pages, I have no doubt he was threatened by classmates, just for different and likely justified reasons.

As it so happens, I did check in to MT the other day, and there was a column by Dr. Cummings regarding quotes in the Bible on the role of husbands and wives. He seemed to have a problem, in his view, that too little was required of the
husband, but noted that it was in context with mores of the time. That is a bit like saying I am a believer in the prescription, but refusing to take the medicine. He seems at times to be a Christian as our Viewpoints Doctor friend [Elliot] claims to be a Republican. That is to say that he claims to be a Christian, while claiming almost none of it’s tenets.

As to Sandefur’s fandom of Cummings, what you and David Mann have written cannot be improved on. I will note that Sandefur shrugged off David’s inquiries, as one who is simply intellectually lazy or inept.

Finally, Sandefur’s “mental midget” reference is simply laughable. Your intelligence is not debatable, and even without your documented accomplishments, your writings are ample proof. Even you most adamant detractor would deny the obvious. I say that, not to ingratiate myself to you, but to point out the obvious, and recalling your sophisticated debates with “John Dewey” that Sandefur is an unworthy opponent. Sincerely, F.D. (P38)

Dear P38,

Re. "Sandefur. What an angry, vitriolic individual! I recall a comment of his wherein he commented that he was threatened with a beating from his classmates for refusing to use the N word. I grew in a small town in a rural county, more black than white, and that word was not common usage, and in fact, my mother taught her children not to use such language. It would dis-ingenuous of me to say it was not used by some, but Sandefur overstates the use to make some point. I say the above to say this: Given his demeanor [bullying] on the MT pages, I have no doubt he was threatened by classmates, just for different and likely justified reasons. "

You are right on target as you always were in Viewpoints! More than likely his assertion is a gross embellishment or even more likely a bold face lie! Being a bully in high school as he is today in Viewpoints, the kids got tire of his bullying and ganged up on him and ended his shenanigans, LOL!--- MAF