Letters to the Editor
Amerigo
Published Letters: 955 Editor's Choice: 60
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Obama vs Clinton and Clinton
[Read the article: The Bhutto test]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would like to add a couple of points to my earlier letter.
The upcoming presidential election is all about who will be the leader of the free world and who will guide US foreign policy.
Of course Obama is going to point out that he was right on the biggest issue of the last few years and Clinton was wrong. We, the American people, want to be offered choices.
The interesting thing is that Clinton (along with others) got it (Iraq) hopelessly wrong even though she could rely on the advice, you would think, of her husband, the former President.
Did her pro-war vote mean that Bill Clinton was pro-war too? It seems to be widely accepted that if Gore had been elected we would not be in Iraq. Or did Hillary split with Bill over this issue? Obviously we will never know, but either way it looks like Obama would be the better bet as future manager of foreign policy.
In November 2005 Hillary said her pro-war vote had been a mistake. Fair enough, but whose mistake? If she went against Bill's advice, then that does not augur well for the future, and the "two for the price of one" argument falls apart.
Yet I find it hard to believe that Bill was pro-war and suspect that Hillary just voted pro-war because she though voting against the war would lose her votes.
That is why I said in a previous letter that Hillary is no Maggie Thatcher. No one who has read Thatcher's biography and the account of the Falklands War would believe for a minute that Thatcher would back off a position she believed in for electoral advantage.
This is why I do not believe that Hillary can provide the leadership the US needs. If she cannot adopt an unpopular position when out of power and win voters over to her side, then I have no faith that she will be able to make the right decisions when she is in the Oval Office.
Barack Obama, Edwards, Richardson are all better choices.
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Hillary apology
[Read the article: The Bhutto test]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]She bears as much responsibility for Iraq and ALL that flows from that debacle as Bush does, particularly since she refuses to apologize or take full responsibility for her culpability.
No, be fair, she HAS apologized for that vote,or at least she said:
If Congress had been asked [to authorize the war], based on what we know now, we never would have agreed,"
So she blamed her vote on being misled by GWB.
The problem is this: Would we want as President a woman who was so gullible and easily misled, even when she had the resource of an ex-President to draw on for advice on the most important vote of her Senate incumbency?
Was she not aware of what Obama and others like him were saying about the consequences of such a war? If not, then why not? Was she not aware of the views of the leaders of just about every major democracy other than Britain and Spain?
And if she was aware and still disagreed with opposing the war, then what was the basis of her thinking?
Did she really believe that Iraq was only days away from launching a major attack on the US. Which ever way you slice it, we don't want her as President.
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Confusion in this discussion
[Read the article: Mike Huckabee's leap of faith]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There is a lot of confusion in this discussion.
I don't think there is anything wrong with a Christian being President of the US. I used to be one myself and continue to admire much of its art, architecture, and music.
We should also bear in mind that Western civilization's concerns with education and health care flow historically from the work of monasteries and convents, that the printing of the Bible was important in the spread of literacy, and so on.
What we do have a right to know is how religious beliefs may influence the future actions of the candidates.
Huckabee is a bit disingenuous in citing himself as an advocate of Golden Rule Christianity, because it is doubtful whether any of the other candidates, even Romney, or even atheists, would dissent from the principle of the Golden Rule.
The key points that define his type of Christianity is are literal belief in the Bible and belief in an apocalyptic end of the world.
All we want to know is how, if at all, his beliefs will effect his decision making when it comes to areas to like abortion, human health, the environment, the Middle East, nuclear war, scientific education etc.
A newspaper column I saw recently by Ann Coulter attacked the Huckster as a dangerous leftie. Absurd perhaps, but I suspect that he probably would be a pragmatist in office who just paid lip service to fundamentalist religious dogma.
Whether he has the intellectual capacity and curiosity to be a president who can provide leadership is quite another matter, and I suspect not.
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Huckabee on Amazon
[Read the article: Mike Huckabee's leap of faith]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Although Huckabee's sermons are not available, he has written or coauthored several books, which you can find reviewed by readers on the Amazon Web site.
The impression one gets from these reviews is that the depth of Huckabee's thought hardly matches that of the other President and author, JFK, whose While England Slept and Profiles of Courage show a great deal more depth of thought, reading, and analysis.
Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence
is one example of a Huckabee book. Hucks was governor of Arkansas when the Jonesboro school shooting took place, and apparently his remedy for such events is very much cast in terms of a return to conservative values, clean living etc., which is all very well, but probably too atavistic to offer a real program for government action.
One wonders whether his prescription for international relations will turn out to be equally simplistic.