Letters to the Editor
had_enough
Published Letters: 817 Editor's Choice: 48
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the wire and JFC
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Heather...it'd be a very interesting piece if you could do a little digging into just WHY *The Wire* has been so completely ignored by the Emmys (except for one writing award for the first or second season, if I recall correctly). I'd be very interested in a hard-hitting piece on just what in hell's going on. The Wire was so *obviously* the best show on television last year. It's not even a competition. In a perfect world, *The Wire* would take every award in every category it could qualify for. The fact that it's been nominated for nothing at all just demonstrates the complete bankruptcy of the Emmys.
The standard story is that Emmy voters vote their wallets. And since The Wire is not shot in Hollywood, and does not use name Hollywood actors, it gets ignored, since very few or none of the Emmy voters will get work from show.
If that's true, and it probably is, it's about as pathetic a thing as I've heard lately. Emmy voters? If you're here, you suck.
As for JFC, I was with it until two weeks ago...then, I gave up. I went from being enchanted to feeling like my chain was being yanked. I also noticed that my enchantment diminished in direct proportion to the disappearance of the surfing sequences. In the first episode, when everything's totally fucked up, and Mitch says "let's get wet" it just made my day. Because, as a life-long surfer myself, there's nothing to beat a session to put life into perspective. It's all waiting for you when you come out of the water, but while you're out there, you're part of something much bigger, and your problems fade away.
I can't believe Milch hasn't make more out of that.
Instead, he's doing a domestic drama that makes very little sense (folks, storytelling really is important..and it's not for amateurs)...some of this I chalk up to Steve Hawk, who is one of the biggest hot-air balloons in a business full of them. If you heard him in Riding Giants (or was it Step into Liquid. I forget now) you know what I mean. Talk about a guy who takes himself too seriously..brother. He's a bad joke. When I saw he was involved, I knew there would be trouble.
I'm sorry the show is crashing. I think it had real potential, squandered by people who, apparently, don't have a David Chase or a David Simon keeping them honest, and making them remember what the point is: tell a good story.
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bad guys finish first
[Read the article: Bush's incompetence gives al-Qaida new life]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush will go off to his fat retirement in Texas and Connecticut, and Cheney will go off to *his* fat retirement in his mansion on the sea in Maryland, and *neither* of these guys will face the least punishment for putting us in terrible danger, putting us into terrible debt, selling off large chunks of the country to their corporate buddies, and, in general, laying waste to the population they pledged to serve.
Can you say declining fossil-fuels, with no Plan B?
Can you say a completely dysfunctional passenger rail system? A system we will need really desperately in the years to come.
Can you say no pressure on the auto industry to improve their products?
Can you say a broken health-care system, sold to the highest bidders who make obscene profits on the backs of the healthy and dismiss the sick to their doom?
Can you say incompetent HMOs who have bought political protection from their incompetence?
Can you say climate-change?
Can you say a grotesquely unfair tax-system?
Can you say a ruined military?
Can you say a GOP that would rather lie and cheat than actually behave like a responsible political party? A party deliberately turned frankly fascist by a bunch of opportunists without scruple?
Can you say a Federal Government corrupted, demoralized, and ruined by one political-hack appointment after another, in key managerial positions?
Can you say a Supreme Court that will now be interested only in supporting corporate interests instead of the people's interests?
An environment polluted and ruined by corporate interests?
And the worst, the VERY worst: the money we spent in Iraq, slaughtering civilians and putting our soldiers in mortal danger for no good reason, could have been spent to secure ALL nuclear fuel and weapons in Russia and elsewhere, and to secure our borders against the inevitable nuke someone will be trying to smuggle into a major american city, and light up. When that happens, you can blame two people: Bush, and Cheney. They've known of the danger for a long time, and have done almost nothing meaningful to deal with it. And now, it may well be too late to do much of anything.
Bush and Cheney have eithe initiated, or intensified, each of these disasters...and that's just a list off the top of my head..I didn't even mention the Middle East...not to mention the ruination of our diplomacy and credibility around the world.
Bush and Cheney have been like vengeful 4-year-olds in a shop full of ming china. They've destroyed the place, and now get to go home for ice-cream.
And things may get much, MUCH worse because of their savage opportunism and greed, their utter lack of any scruple.
In fact, they'll get REWARDED with fat pensions, consulting fees, speaking fees, and the adulation of the idiot-30-percenters who would buy a bridge in Brooklyn if one was offered to them.
Our system doesn't work right, if these men can get off scott free and waltz into a rich, easy retirement. A system in which that can happen, is a system that isn't working.
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uh, that one's easy..
[Read the article: Pouring saltwater in Katrina victims' wounds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...they cheat reflexively. And, by the way, it starts at the top. At least three generations of Bush family men have been rank criminals, in the government trough, in covert-ops, in business. For the Bush family, cheating is a way of life. And, it's really not cheating, to them. It's just how things are.