Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 407 Editor's Choice: 5
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playing with words
[Read the article: How Bush wrecked conservatism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can play with the words Mr/Ms Calhoun but you can't change the story. Bush didn't invent the inhuman, degrading, backward- looking policies he espouses. The whole philosophy is wrong and has been wrong for thousands of years. why? Because it entrenches injustice and creates a Greco-Roman political system that leads inevitably to war. Conservatives (though they do their best to hide it) still believe the male is superior to the female, the white citizen is superior to the black and the whole conservative belief system is driven by a mindset that God created the world as it is, in all its horror, and that to attempt to change it is to subvert God's will. You can put conscience and conservatism in the same sentence but all they have in common is that they both start with 'c'. All the high flown rhetoric in the world can't hide the fact that conservatism is basically about people who have a lot of 'stuff' and don't want the working class to get their grubby mitts on it. More importantly they need elites desperately because they want and need to belong to one. Every time I hear an American use the term 'working stiff' I see the real meaning of class and what makes conservatism tick.
Essentially it's Darwinian, and 'nature, red in tooth and claw' should not be any thinking person's model for a society. You create such a society at your peril, which is why conservatives spend so much time creating artificial threats to distract the populace from the real danger: them.
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good egg
[Read the article: How Bush wrecked conservatism]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]MR Calhoun - My father loved scrabble and I know people who play it are usually civilized and good eggs. Even if you're a conservative, you're probably basically decent.As a matter of fact, most people are. It's the politicians who abuse the political process and set people against each other for political gain. Tony Blair has put me off the third way for the time being. The term has been devalued for me.
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keep on working
[Read the article: A bizarre, unsolicited e-mail from Gen. Petraeus' spokesman ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Keep it up GG. You've obviously hit a raw nerve with Boylan and the apoplectic ihash. You must be on to something or they wouldn't be howling at the moon the way they are. If you really were a hack who peddled inaccuracies, they wouldn't give a damn what you wrote.
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What about the future?
[Read the article: Hitlers, Hitlers and more Hitlers]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Podhoretz is living in the past. He's like someone with a rear view mirror strapped to his forehead and everything he sees is reflected in this mirror. He can't see what's in front of him, only what's behind him. In this case about sixty years behind him. Hitler came to power because the looney right of his own country wanted him there to protect them from Communism. Little did they know he was every bit as bad as what they feared. Even the Pope of the time supported Hitler because he was (they believed) going to protect the Catholic church from the Communists! It wasn't until the Nazis started murdering priests and nuns and Bishops that the church came to its senses. Far too late. John Maynard Keynes warned everyone about the Treaty of Versailles, signed with Germany after World War I, and told them that if Germany had to pay war reparations to France greater than its gross domestic product there would be another war, and of course there was. Podhoretz waves Hitler around like a fright mask but the history of that era is much more complicated than he ever admits. To link Islamic extremists to the Nazis is simplistic and devious. Islamic extremists are not a state, not a government and they don't have an army controlled by a government, in spite of what is regularly claimed by Bushites .What the neo cons have done, with help from a bunch of dimwits like Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, is to create a powder keg in the Middle East which will tear the entire region apart when it explodes. None of this was started by Iran but Iran is a useful distraction from the real crisis which has been created by the Republican party, shadowy nutjobs who don't even have to be elected and decades of lunacy from the CIA. If Iran wants a bomb it's because they know they're next on the neo con hitlist, not because they want to conquer the world or establish a caliphate. That's just opportunistic garbage from an extremely dangerous man who hasn't got any credibility at all.