Letters to the Editor
bloomsbury
Published Letters: 401 Editor's Choice: 5
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knowing and not knowing
[Read the article: Barack Obama is a Muslim, and other stories]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was shocked a few years ago when I was talking to an American woman I know, an intelligent and likeable person, and I said a few firebrand things about America's healthcare system. To my amazement she began to defend it, trying to convince me that everything was fine and 'we have the emergency rooms' and so on. I realized that she knew next to nothing about the subject. Because she and her husband had a good health plan from his previous employment which continued into retirement she was blind to what was really going on. But later I decided she just didn't want to know. She had made a choice not to know. It's the same with Barack Obama: anyone who doesn't know by now that he's not a Muslim, doesn't want to know. They're willing to be lied to, just the way she was. He should still try to combat the misinformation campaign but there are limits to how much 'the truth will set you free'. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink - or think.
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nice poster
[Read the article: What Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Fred Hiatt mean by "bipartisanship"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Wire tappping for national security was legal until 1972 when the courts decided Nixon (and the Republicans) couldn't be trusted with it. While it was legal Bobby Kennedy tapped Martin Luther King's phone for'national security'. When King was sweet talking some woman Bobby used to pass the best bits on to his brother John. It probably never occurred to either of them that what they were doing was wrong: after all it was LEGAL. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, John Kennedy and Bobby Kennedy. All murdered by the secret state. Two of them because they were outside of it and two of them because they were inside of it and got too close to its power.
Nixon went into a wire tapping frenzy after 'secret' documents about the Vietnam war were leaked and published in the New York Times in an article by William Beecher. This was information the American public was entitled to have but not in Nixon's rather strange mind. The FBI was put on the case and within a day came back to say that the leaks came from 'arrogant Kennedy people'. Nixon now went to war with his own people, never mind the Vietnamese. Wire taps were put on government officials and journalists. In the end about seventeen of them. This broke with a tradition that domestic wire taps were supposedly only used on racketeers, organized crime and foreign embassies. They were almost never used on government officials and use of them on journalists was non-existent. Nixon threw all of that out the window, sticking with the real tradition of the Republican party, which is that they're not conservatives at all but wild-eyed reactionaries who will resort to any desperate means to wield and retain power. J. Edgar Hoover, when asked about wire taps on journalists said he would never be stupid enough to do that because it would come out and 'the press would murder us' (interesting choice of words). Those were the days, when the FBI and the government and the CIA were afraid of the press! Now the 'press' is afraid of them.
When it comes to these matters both political parties have blood on their hands(so to speak)and might not want to throw that pebble into the pond (by hauling the telecoms into court) because they don't know where the ripples will end. Making spying on Americans legal might make it legal but it doesn't make it a good idea. Saying 'We just want to spy on terrorists/Muslims' is like Hitler saying 'I just want to spy on Jews'. When you consider how much their ability to spy on their own citizens has been enhanced by technological developments the lawmakers should be limiting the state's ability to carry out domestic spying, not assisting it. Terrorism, as ever, is their smokescreen for abuse of power. I read the other day that the chance of an American dying in a terrorist attack is 1 in 93,000. In other words an American is far more likely to be hit by lightning or hit by a car or to slip on the sidewalk and break their neck than to die in a terrorist attack. Trapped in the Washington bubble it might be hard for these political hacks to realize that. Their obsessions are not those of the people they govern and until they are the present dysfunctional system will continue, whoever's in government. The first step is to get rid of the Republicans because no progress at all can be made with them in the White House. My guess is that the issue of the telecoms and the surveillance laws is just another wedge issue to divide and distract the Democrats and their electoral base. From that perspective only, the Democrats have done the politically savvy thing. They should be judged on what they do if they win government.
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she speaks!
[Read the article: Pipe down, Cindy McCain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm relieved to learn that Cindy McCain can actually speak. I was beginning to think she was a Stepford wife, the model that came with no vocal chords. The perfect Republican wife, considering how much they hate Hillary Clinton for daring to get up and speak in public. For daring to have a brain.
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don't do it
[Read the article: What Nancy Pelosi, Steny Hoyer and Fred Hiatt mean by "bipartisanship"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]bamage, you're crazy! Don't sit home on election day that's exactly what the Republicans want you to do and it's probably why they started this whole kerfuffle with the FISA laws in the first place. It's called divide and conquer.