Letters to the Editor
PaulBC
Published Letters: 200 Editor's Choice: 24
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Real or parody?
[Read the article: In other words]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Reading this made me think back to the amazingly accurate Onion parody "Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity is Finally Over" written before Bush took office.
OK, these statements are not precisely the same, but there is an eerie similarity:
Onion: "And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."
Real (apparently): "I vowed that day that we would go on the offense against an enemy, that the best way to defeat this enemy is to find them overseas and bring them to justice so they will not hurt the folks here at home."
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no mystery to explain
[Read the article: "Idol" slayer?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Like one reader said, "A lot of those votes were probably from teeny-bopper, tiger beat readers who think he's cute."
While there are relatively few competent, talented singers out there, there are paradoxically far too many of them to get ahead on ability alone. It sounds as if Sanjaya has a knack for connecting with his audience. He's obviously enthusiastic and doesn't wilt in front of the camera. Based on still photos, I'd say he's handsome and has a winning smile. People are probably voting for him because they enjoy seeing him on TV. If he wants to make a career of it, he can work on his singing--and if he wanted to go the lipsynch route, it's not like he'd be the first.
There's nothing subversive about it. This is how pop stars are made.
It's especially ironic that Howard Stern would criticize him. What exactly is Stern's talent supposed to be, besides getting in people's faces, and voicing thoughts that most non-Tourette's sufferers manage to suppress? Note, I'm not knocking Stern or Sanjaya. Both share a natural intuition for finding an audience, and this is really the deciding factor in the entertainment field.
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same old lie
[Read the article: Yeah, that's the ticket]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They're not even trying to be creative anymore. Do a google search on "Pentagon Says Bush Records of Service Were Destroyed". In that case, the claim was that 30 year old archival microfilm had "deteriorated" and was destroyed when trying to transcribe it (microfilm is old technology that can be made to last eons.).
Oh, just for laughs, do another search on "Bush Military Records Turn Up". The money quote: "A Pentagon official said the earlier contention that the records were destroyed was an 'inadvertent oversight.'" (Oops, we forgot we weren't supposed to make up a fake story.)
At least Sen. Leahy is calling b******t on this. The AP headline even uses the word "lying." I'm starting to get dizzy.
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i think i remember vonnegut's talk
[Read the article: Playing chess with Kurt Vonnegut]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's funny Andrew Leonard says he cannot remember a word of Vonnegut's talk--maybe because he was so distracted by the personal connection. I have forgotten a lot on the past two decades, but I'm pretty sure it was 1986 (possibly 1987) when Vonnegut came to my university campus to talk. It may have even been the same tour.
He spent a lot of time talking about the difference between fiction (as we now know it anyway) and reality--mostly that in reality, not much out of the ordinary happens. You wouldn't tell a story like this: "John got up and ate breakfast. Then he got in the car and drove to work." (I think he might have also said that in some other cultures, that would be a story). Anyway, he seemed to be saying that the root of people's unhappiness is expecting their life to unfold like fiction when the whole point of fiction is that more interesting stuff happens than most people can expect from their own life.
Not sure if all of that is entirely true, or if true, not obvious. (I'll be embarrassed if I am remembering another speaker, though.) I agree that Vonnegut was basically a decent guy who really cared about other people and wished we were happier. I liked his novels, but I think his most important trait was never his imagination or wit (both well above average, but surpassed by others) but the fact that he was a fundamentally good person.
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deleting from server
[Read the article: Karl Rove, again]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"But every one of those was to or from someone, right? Rove's deletions are completely beside the point if his pen pals were obeying the law to preserve them on their end."
It depends. If they were all connecting to the same server, it's possible that the recipients never saved a copy of their email. Then he could delete every copy including the recipients'.
Of course, if there are regular backup tapes, it is almost impossible that Rove deleted everything. The recipients may also have some copies either because they saved them, or because they got cached (if they're using a client like Outlook, they might have been autoarchived on the other machines).
But even if the recipient intended to follow the law, they would have reasonably assumed that the copy on the server was sufficient, and would not have taken any other actions to save the emails from delete-happy presidential advisors.
Rove strikes me as one of these people who thinks he is a tech guru (remember how he registered all those domains to prevent them from being used to parody Bush?) but probably makes a lot of novice mistakes. Some emails may be gone for good, but all we need is one that shows culpability and evidence that he tried and failed to delete it.
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not sure of the point here
[Read the article: We'll have what he's having]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...unless prayer breakfasts are intrinsically funny, or we must be reminded endlessly of Bush's evangelicalism (but a Catholic prayer breakfast? A Sunday "Pancake Breakfast" fundraiser, sure, but since when do Catholics do prayer breakfasts).
There is an old Zippy the Pinhead strip (Reagan-era I think) where Zippy is at a prayer breakfast and explains that he is praying for a power lunch. That is at least chuckle-level funny, and probably should have been left as the final attempt to derive humor from prayer breakfasts.