Letters to the Editor
casual_observer
Published Letters: 1359 Editor's Choice: 1
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LWM
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Like Clinton, Carter was an outsider. They just use the south as cannon fodder for wars.
Bush remains an outsider, and was a southern governor, as was Carter and Clinton, so I don't see the distinction. By your logic, they should be all over Bush, but they are not. I think there must be some other reason as to why Time (again, justifiably) openly assailed Carter for the Marston issue, but can only muster yawns and disinterest regarding Bush.
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Insider or Outsider?
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But, Bush is a deep insider by proxy, and the cirle of power is the same under the idiot son, as for the father. -- jhillr64
He has the lineage to have been an insider, but that's as far as it goes, in my opinion. Ironically, I believe he has as little respect and love for "insider Washington" as many bloggers do. He has little respect for the establishment press, virtually none for the Congress. These are elements to be used, in his view, but he is not of them. Yes, he had some insiders in the cabinet, but they didn't do well there, and many, maybe most, left long ago. The ones that have done really well are the ones he brought with him.
He fancies himself as able to vault over all that inside game and work his will in other ways. He's a radical and an idealogue (idiologue), as is the modern Cheney. Such folks aren't establishment, and they aren't insiders.
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@Michael Harold
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree that the Bushes are not a southern family. I am aware of the Grandfather. But George W. Bush was, is, and will always be a southerner. Linguistically, culturally, politically, religiously, socially. Of the Texas variety. You don't have to be born one, to be one.
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LWM et al
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I guess we'll have to disagree on the "southiness" of Bush. I maintain that one can end up very different from where one starts out in life.
As an example, follow the link below to the story of Cynthia Ann Parker, who was born scotch/irish in Illinois, but spent most of her life as a Comanche woman, and mother of one of the greatest of the late Comanche chiefs, Quannah Parker.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynthia_Ann_Parker
Just to be very clear, I'm not drawing any similarities between Bush and any Comanche, living or dead. The Comanche are a great and admirable people. I'm simply saying that family history plays only a part in who an individual actually turns out to be.
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@Michael Harold
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Also, Texas is not the South. Texas is a separate country.
-- Michael Harold
Robert Lee didn't see it that way. He prized General Hood's Texans. They plugged the holes in his lines more than once.
Anyway, we've wasted enough pixels on this digression, I imagine...
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All Immigrants
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ivins was a fake Texan. Not born there and spent her career in Austin. And Austin isn't in Texas; it's in California. It's just surrounded by Texas. --Anonymous
William B. Travis was not born in Texas. Sam Houston was not born in Texas. S.F. Austin was not born in Texas.
But these guys were Texans, just a surely as Cynthia Ann Parker was Comanche. And just as surely as those 100 soldiers who just took their oaths of citizenship in Iraq are now Americans.
It's not part of the american character, I'd argue, to get hung up on pedigrees and how many generations a family has been in one place or another.
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WT
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not against people who treasure them, mind you, for their own purposes, but I do hate to be cowboyed or confederacied by the likes of a George W. Bush. Damned annoying, it is -- damned annoying.
WT, did you happen to catch the CSPAN broadcast of Clinton speaking at the 50th anniversary of the Truman Presidential Library?
It is the finest speech I've heard from him. It was a very wide ranging talk, but in it, he talked briefly about the recent bomb plots in the UK, by a group of medical doctors. He approached the plot from the position of how extraordinary it was that a group of highly educated people, who entered a country not as bombers who take lives, but as doctors who have taken oaths to heal, and do no harm. He proposed that what turned doctors into bombers was isolation, rejection, disenfranchisement in their new country. What turned them, he said, was a society that places great value on what distinguishes people from each other, and largely ignores the overwhelming commonalities among people. Shorthand, I thought to myself, the good old british class system.
While I don't know the details of the bomber plot and who the bombers were, Clinton's thesis struck me as very true. And I agree with you that there must be great pride and comfort to be found in looking at a landscape that 5 generations in one's family have also looked at and called home, before you. But where that comfort feeling goes wrong is when it is used to somehow argue that those with only three generations of residence are somehow less, and those who just got here--well they have nothing to say whatsoever.
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@KarenM
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think he or any of the rest of us said, or would say, that those who have arrived later should have no say in how things get done...
Karen, there is no need to defend WT, first because he doesn't need it, and second, because nobody is attacking him, least of all me. I don't attribute those sentiments to him or you. I was expressing my own opinion.
But I do attribute them to many who, for example, froth at the mouth about "illegal aliens." And I do think Clinton had a point in that this kind of thinking leads to disenfranchisement, which can lead to violence.
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@Sabine River
[Read the article: Our broken political discourse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Holly, the first time I heard that joke was in a bar in Three Rivers, Texas 30 years ago. It was told by a drunk cajun to a whole bar full of drunk Texans. All those Texans just laughed and nodded their heads.