To the editor,

On May 25 my wife Helen and I attended the 87th running of the Indianapolis 500 auto race. Shortly after taking our seats with approximately 325,000 other race fans, we were treated to a fly-by from a B-2 Northrop “Stealth” Bomber.

You would need to be really brain dead not to be very impressed by the sight of this airplane in flight. The black, futuristic, triangular shaped flying wing appears to be right out of science fiction. But it works as advertised, as America’s adversaries have recently learned, first in the Balkans on orders from Bill Clinton and lately in the Middle East.

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Chilled by the sight of the B-2 in flight, my first thought was that “I’m sure glad this thing is on our side.” Flown from Whiteman AFB in Missouri, the B-2 can attack targets anywhere in the world with its 40,000-pound bomb load and near invisibility to enemy defenses.

My second thought was, “Now I know why they hate us.” Surely, our enemies know that their creaky, socialistic, economies can no more produce something like the B-2 than they can fly to the moon, something Americans were doing before most of them were born.

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While we enjoyed the Indy 500, millions of ordinary working class Americans shopped at Wal-Mart, went fishing, watched ball games, drove their boats, SUVs, motorcycles and campers or grilled enough steaks and burgers to thoroughly upset all the world’s America haters sitting in their 500-square-foot homes or waiting for public transportation to take them to their pathetic local market. Good.

If you go on the Internet, you can find a number of Web sites devoted to opposition to the B-2. The anti-military crowd feels that the money would have been better spent on schools, hospitals aid to the homeless, aids research or perhaps reparations for slavery.

Actually, these people have opposed every new weapons system that I have ever heard of, and if given their way I’m certain that our army would now be carrying muzzle-loading muskets.

Fortunately, better minds prevail, and our adversaries learn the hard way that a free people are always more than a match for anything that they can do and we Americans always have enough left over for a good time.

Prentiss Davis

Truckee