Letters to the Editor
FredrickBernanke
Published Letters: 170 Editor's Choice: 8
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HRC: Don't Drop Out, Change Your Goal
[Read the article: Should Clinton stay in the race?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hillary's going to have to adjust to the fact that she is going to lose. The lose will still give her a 2-1 election record...and even Bill had a few election setbacks on his way to the top.
Here's why she lost:
The Hillary campaign, sensing that the public might be a tad queasy about her qualifications to be president, initially presented her as the candidate: "Ready From Day One.'
Interestingly, the public seemed to express little doubt that Hillary was indeed presidential timber---the issue of her readiness for the job never surfaced in any significant venue.
But relying on her past, by looking backward, she allowed Mr. O to have the future all to himself for most of the campaign. Hillary became a relic, an anachronism, entangled for better or worse in what was. Barack became, almost by default, the candidate of what lies ahead.
Hillary, with a little more difficulty, could have assumed that mantle from day one, but the concerns within her camp about voters even accepting the legitimacy of a female candidate led her to tackle what turned out to be a straw-man.
She ran (for a long time) a campaign based on yesterdays; Barack didn't have the multitude of yesterdays that did Hillary. So he ran on tomorrows...and for most people, tomorrows hold more hope than yesterdays.
She's walked where no woman has walked before! She acquitted herself well, taking the blows, showing grace under fire, tenaciousness, even a hint of charm and a formidable knowledge of the issues. Win or lose, like it or not, Hillary Clinton has become an historic figure (with the bad luck of competing against another historic figure in Barack Obama.)
And Hillary has many tomorrows still ahead. She's about half Nader's age, isn't she?
She should no more withdraw from the race than a football team that finds itself down 35-0 at the end of the first half should therefore refuse to come out of the lockeroom to play the second.
What she should do, however, is re-goal her campaign to a desideratum other than winning the nomination.
Use the FREE airtime and media coverage to accomplish something. What should the goal(s) be? I haven't thought that through. But she would be nuts to waste all the free exposure she will get by remaining in the race and crawl back to the virtual anonymity of the Senate.
[Note: I am not a supporter of hers only because Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton would have been a mockery of our democratic election process.]
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Nobody Worries About the Cost of Success, Only of Failure
[Read the article: The cold price of hot blood]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Excellent article on what sounds like an interesting book with some arguable quantifications.
The fact that the dollar costs associated with the Iraq Catastrophe are interesting and perhaps important is only because the Iraq ________ is not a War, but is indeed a Catastrophe.
How much did WWII cost in today's dollars? Whatever that number may be, would anyone seriously argue that it was not worth the expense? What did the Revolutionary or Civil Wars cost?
The reason why the expenditures related to Iraq deserve minute scrutiny is because the entire, and on-going, endeavor was ill-conceived, mis-planned, devoid of strategic necessity, mis-managed, mission-redefined countless times, produced paradoxical outcomes (as anticipated by our civilian leadership, and continues after all these years to be a conflict that may last into eternity.
JFK said, "Success has a thousand fathers, but failure is an orphan."
The cost of WWII was staggering, for sure, but those expenditures produced a clear victory against a clear, nightmarish enemy. In Iraq, we have yet to define what a clear victory would look like; and the "nightmarish" enemy our civilian leadership made of Saddam is long since gone, and proved to be nothing more than a paper tiger anyway.
A book like this which puts "hard" dollars amounts on some of the costs of the Iraq Failure is certainly a worthwhile contribution to the debate. But the most significant costs cannot be reduce to money: The needless loss of American, Iraqi, British and other lives, and the stain on the history of the USA transcend numerical calculation.
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What Reporter was an Intellectual Match for JFK, Clinton or Nixon?
[Read the article: The ornery pride of the political journalist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the reasons the news media is held in such low esteem by the public is that their primary function is reporting on the doings of others. I believe it was Thoreau who characterized all newspapers as being merely conveyances of "gossip."
By their job descriptions, reporters have to stick their noses into other people's business; they're snoops. Again by definition, they can't "mind their own business" and let others be, they've got to pry, maybe try to catch a subject in an intoxicated moment to get a good story out of her, feign friendship in order to get a subject to open up. Work that approximates a spy's but without the danger or glamour.
Spies are cool; reporters are pricks, in most people's minds.
TV news types (from whom most of the public gets their info) are obviously wannabe actors or actresses who lack the talent for those careers, but still possess the adequate physical attractiveness and clear enunciation to be "stars" as news-people.
If they are covering top-line politicians, the reporters are usually far less bright than the subjects of their coverage. And that shows by how easily they are manipulated by high-power pols. Is ____ ______, the reporter, an intellectual match for HRC or Obama, or JFK or Nixon?
Reporters are average people, very average people. And very average people almost always suffer at the hands of very above average people.
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@Houngan
[Read the article: The ornery pride of the political journalist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Yes, there are some exceptional journalists.
But there are also some exceptional hair stylists, taxi drivers, real estate agents and so on.
Overall, in general, on average---whatever term one prefers--reporters/journalists are what I described them to be in my post.
Citing Mencken or Edward R. Morrow or Hemmingway, doesn't change the fact that journalists, in general, are very average people. Physicists or mathematicians or Presidents are not.
I should, perhaps, have added that the press serves a vital function in our system, obviously.