Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3299 Editor's Choice: 7
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Two memories of my own
[Read the article: Lying to Congress has become a Republican principle, literally]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ondelette, as long as Mona is talking Occam's razor, I remember reading Whittaker Chambers' book, Witness, when I was a teenager. My father thought highly of it, but my sense of it was that Chambers was one of those highly intelligent, but socially inept or otherwise disadvantaged people who'll do anything for attention, much like Nixon himself. Yes, he had a remarkably detailed memory, and an instinct for the furtive which served him well. I remember to this day his brilliant description of how to ferret out information without drawing attention to yourself; it was clear that he'd been doing this since long before anyone had recruited him a spy.
To be honest, he reminded me of Raskolnikov -- the alienated persona par excellence. Whether or not his portrayal of Soviet espionage in the State Department was true or false, he was clearly so eager to please his new masters that he would have said anything, and he had the intelligence to make it seem plausible. The perfect prodigal, but in no way trustworthy as a witness to anything.
The question on the table is why these folks were rehabilitated. (We already know how they were rehabilitatedl.) My memory is of Negroponte. Like Chambers, he had skills that the project desperately needed, and it would have been very difficult to find them in another whose loyalty could be trusted. The bad news, in other words, is that like the vampires they were, our damaged neocon apparatchiks rose again. The good news is that there would have been no reason to bring them back at all, had they not, in a real sense, been the last of their kind.
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At the end of the last thread
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]someone calling his self jewhad Jewspiracy castigates us for our silly conspiracy theories. I couldn't help laughing out loud when reading his description of us as the paranoid 20-25% of Salon's readership who think that:
...Jews are Running the World from the Deck of their Orbital Nuclear Battlestation...
When I stopped laughing, I wondered, given the available evidence, and Glenn's fairly comprehensive condensation of it here over the past several months, how anyone -- even those who disagree with us -- could honestly reduce our concerns about the neocon agenda to this kind of unintentionally hilarious parody.
Then, of course, I came here, and read about GWB's book club. All I can say is that if you substitute neoconservative for Jew in Mr. Jewspiracy's formulation, it pretty much sums up not what we fear or believe, but what these folks actually aspire to for themselves. It's not a joke at all, not to them. Their own statements convict them of a world view that's very nearly impossible either to believe or to parody.
As for Mr. Jewspiracy's clumsy attempt at calling us anti-semites, it's pretty clear that the fact that many prominent neoconservatives are Jewish, while not exactly a coincidence, is also not what is driving them. GWB's millennial Christianity serves as well as their concern for Israel in excusing what is, after all, a much simpler motivation, one which the world has suffered many times in the past. No matter how you slice it, these folks are plumb crazy, and the only person who can truly understand what they're up to is one who can laugh and cry at the same time.
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Freudian slip
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In my last comment, his self sould have been himself. I may not be an anti-semite, but it seems I do have a thing for rednecks. :-)
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Sounds familiar, sounds very familiar....
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the aspects of neoconservatism that makes it so uniquely pernicious is that it is consciously and deliberately deceitful. They see themselves as vanguards of an intellectually superior elite who have an entitlement -- even an obligation -- to use concepts for the lower masses (such as religion and morality) to manipulate them into passivity. -- GlennGreenwald
Could these neoconservatives actually be (gasp) Communists? (Just kidding.... You -- and we -- have discussed ad nauseum the attraction which Leninism has for these poor unfortunates.)
Frankly, I wouldn't mind visiting their embalmed bodies in an elegant mausoleum on the National Mall, but only if I could stick a pin in them -- just to be sure that they were well and truly gone.
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OT
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What's up with Digby? Looks like a major re-design is underway. I suppose that's a good thing, but I hate to wait....
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False alarm
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sigh...Digby's where he always was, and looks as he always did. Somehow, my browser decided to switch my bookmark to the RSS feed without informing me. Bad browser, incomprehensible browser. It's a neocon conspiracy, I'm sure.
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Because, just because
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why do you assume Digby's a he? -- sysprog
It's a purely grammatical assumption. If he's a she, no one could be happier than your humble correspondent.
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On the Marxian view of religion
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Paul R., thanks for the snippet of true facts about Marx, who's been turned into a cartoon by both sides in our current ideological struggles. I'm reminded of the signs carried about the stage in Brecht's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny:
Für die gerechte Verteilung der überirdischen Güter
(For the just distribution of otherworldly goods.)
and
Für die ungerechte Verteilung der irdischen Güter
(For the unjust distribution of worldly goods.)
About sums it up, nicht wahr?
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Where in the sixties were you?
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People went on pilgrimages to airports to spit on returning soldiers and call them baby killers. -- ondelette
This I absolutely don't remember, despite having been in what most folks would consider medias res.
Would you be willing to cite chapter and verse, just so we can lay the issue to rest?
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ondelette
[Read the article: The president receives "lessons" from his neoconservative tutors]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the middle of things. I'm not asking who, only where and when.