Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 360 Editor's Choice: 12
-
Commonplace at WaPo
[Read the article: The administration's FISA falsehoods continue unabated]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I haven't been registered there very long, so I don't have a perspective for this, but I just read through the comments posted on McConnell's piece. The response is overwhelmingly negative. Is this commonplace over there, or could we be seeing more of the groundswell?
Yes, this is very common. One of the things that I think has surprised and disturbed the press, especially the Post, is the depth and vehemence of public anger. They keep wanting to ascribe it to loony-tune liberals with a partisan axe to grind.
Or say they're doing so, anyway. One thing I took away from the Ben Smith bloggerheads discussion with Glenn was this sense of cyncism and entitlement that Smith displayed. You see this all the time.
For example, there was a review of an enormous (>1600 pages) book by Vincent Bugliosi in this week's NYT Book Review. The review was actually pretty good, and pretty amusing. But then he threw off a line about opinion being shaped by people still living in their mother's basement.
And, you know, for some reason that set me off. Because I said to myself "Like who? Name me one influential blogger who is living in his or mother's basement. Atrios? Markos? Glenn? Most of these people are carrying around graduate degrees."
And then I said to myself, "I have no trouble at all attaching actual people's names, and actual people's writing to claims like the press has peddled administration lies."
At some point you have to conclude that they really have no interest in what the truth is. The only thing one can conclude is that their job is not defined by honest, clear reporting, but by some other metric. It's bothersome that people notice, but not so much that they're gonna change the metric. So they sneer and move on.
-
Not fair to pick on MoveOn
[Read the article: Giving Democrats a pass on ending the war?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Here's the email I just got from MoveOn:
Urgent! ! !
Congress needs to show some Backbone on Iraq! You are aware that Congress has blinked, the funding bill going to Bush is just another blank check to fund the war. Please open this link it will provide you with back-up information.
They supported reid-feingold. They were instrumental, in my view, in moving the Dem presidential candidates further away from support of the occupation, through their Town Hall session.
One of the issues they have is that they see themselves (and this is straight from Eli Parisher's mouth) as having to represent the views that are very widely held by their community. They do not endorse wonkery or specific legislation, but try to identify broad thematic elements that resonate with the large majority of the people who have registered with them.
Also, I think they (to some degree wrongly) were trying to be "realistic." I shared some of the "realism" when I believed the first bill was a good first step. It turns out (as fellow reader JH pointed out to me yesterday) that I was wrong. By starting with a weak bill, they ended up with nowhere to go but down.
I also do not agree that the blogosphere in general has been tolerant of this. Atrios certainly hasn't. Nor the frontpagers at DKos. Digby is as outraged as ever.
So I can see that if you're gonna point fingers, MoveOn is one place to point. But I think that they too will see that they were wrong not to press for stronger legislation from the outset.
The intransigent stupidity of this president is very hard to bring into your calculations. Ask James Baker and his fellow panelists. They offered Bush a way out. He not merely spurned them--he escalated.
Finally, I think there has not been enough attention paid to the people i consider the key players in all this--republican senators up for election in 2008. All 21 of those guys are running with the occupation on their backs, and they can be pressured--by the majority of the people in their states who oppose this catastrophic imperial adventure.