Letters to the Editor
William Timberman
Published Letters: 3298 Editor's Choice: 7
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Telling It Like It Is
[Read the article: Gen. Odom explains basic reality to Hugh Hewitt and the "Victory Caucus"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If a general believes what he's saying, and has reason to believe it, he doesn't have to explain why he believes it. Take it or leave it, either you know what he knows or you don't. It's a wonderful thing to see when the general happens to be talking to a weasel like Hewitt who knows neither what he believes nor why he believes it.
For folks like us, it's not so easy. If you listened to Glenn take on Mr. Gaffney the other night, you know what I mean. The object of a person engaged in political dialogue is to persuade those listening that what he believes is correct, which means that evidence -- truncated evidence in the case of a radio interview -- must be marshaled and delivered, which means dependent clauses, which means that both folksy and brusque and dominating are out as a style. I think Glenn mentioned himself in one of his comments how difficult this is, especially when a battle of personalities is -- as it almost inevitably will be -- a significant part of the argument.
Politicians have always had this problem. Nixon's furtive and paranoiac style was obvious to anyone who cared to peer around the lens of ideology; Gore was indeed wooden, possibly because he'd been convinced by his advisors that what he believed wouldn't get him elected unless he fudged it. It took someone with the self-confidence of an FDR, a Truman, or a Reagan to dispense with the claptrap of focus groups and speak as themselves.
That doesn't mean that they were right, just that it was easier for them to get their points across, because people trusted their delivery -- the fact that their personalities were obviously integrated ones -- even when there wasn't much content in the message being delivered, or when the message itself was too complicated.
My take on this phenomenon, which is known to everybody, and has been dissected over and over, is that it's perfectly okay to judge a politician by his personal qualities. To judge his program, on the other hand, one must look to the ideas he endorses, and the arguments which others present under his endorsement. What books has he read, which policies of the past does he refer to with approval, which does he reject, etc., etc.
That's where we come in. We help find the ideas, we keep them before the public. If we do our jobs properly, we help the public decide which ideas are plausible and which are not, which policies are helpful, and which are not. We also -- and here Glenn is a master -- help rebut the ideas we don't believe are worthwhile, and expose the sophistries of those who defend them dishonestly.
Seen in this light, politics isn't quite so complicated -- there's a natural division of labor, and a place for everyone to contribute. Call it the genius of democracy.
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He Does, We Do
[Read the article: Gen. Odom explains basic reality to Hugh Hewitt and the "Victory Caucus"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mason: If you would speak English we would all know what you are saying.
The English language is a wonderful bastard; as a consequence it's both concise and flexible. Here's an example of the concision of English, from a U.S. warehouse I once worked in in Verona. It was a bilingual sign, posted on every supporting column:
Italian:
Spedite per prima
La merce ricevuta per prima
English:
First in, first out
Disclaimer: I love Italy, and I also love Italian (and Italians.) My first success at a conversation with an actual Italian in his own language was one of the most liberating experiences of my life.
Clownsense makes use of the opposite end of the spectrum, the figurative, metaphorical, flexible end, as in:
I am I because my little dog knows me,
or
with a quart of maggots working where his mouth had been,
or
Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of war,
or
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
or
The only completely stationary object in the room was an enormous couch on which two young women were buoyed up as though upon an anchored balloon. They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.
Let me say this about that; clownsense is one of the unknown unknowns. Hands off clownsense. Let clownsense be clownsense. He is needed, and we'd be well advised to reason not the need.
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Shall the Circle Be Unbroken?
[Read the article: Gen. Odom explains basic reality to Hugh Hewitt and the "Victory Caucus"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]christian h:
D-Rocks isn't an arguer, he's a magical solipsist, sort of a one man Pan's Labyrinth.
Johnalive:
Dominant posters aren't, by-and-large, into dominance. Type something, push the Publish my letter button, and the dominance, such as it is, is diminished. Would that work on Washington, do you suppose?
Matt Stoller shouldn't complain. In a very real sense, our hippy legacy is the right-wing which plagues us today. Unfinished business, yes, but a business which we couldn't have finished without help, and we didn't get much of that. Jimmy Carter said we should be worried; Ronald Reagan said nonsense, and pointed to a false dawn. The crowd went wild.
But yes, here we are still. Fresh from seeing our children off on their journeys, getting familiar with our cardiologists and dermatologists and oncologists. We're not pleased to be going through this all again -- variations on a theme by Beelzebub -- but we're doing what we can. And just for the record, don't expect wisdom from us. If you can use moral support, it's yours. None of us can legitimately claim to offer more than that.