Letters to the Editor
Terry A.
Published Letters: 181 Editor's Choice: 22
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Unintentional Irony - 28 in a series of 34,562
[Read the article: A chilly reception for the "return on success"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The warning to American diplomats and staff that Baghdad outside the Green Zone is too dangerous sure sounds like "ordinary life" in Baghdad to me.
(I'm sure President Feeb's veracity on this was purely accidental . . .)
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What a nightmare it is . . .
[Read the article: Why Bush won't attack Iran]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]. . . to live in an America where the likes of George Dubya Bush and Condoleeza Rice are the moderates in a debate about going to war.
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Good old days
[Read the article: Those were the days]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Once upon a time, we knew how to do clandestine regime change."
True enough. Of course, once upon a time, someone who advocated it publically in America would have been excoriated as a scary imperialist freak.
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Get a grip.
[Read the article: Clarence Thomas casts himself in "Native Son"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]How can you possibly compare what Clarence Thomas feels about unlawful treatment of *himself* to what Clarence Thomas writes to justify unlawful treatment of *others*??
Let's get a grip, people. That's **them**. This is **me**.
It's like you've never met a conservatist or something.
t.
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All a matter of selling.
[Read the article: Well, he's the King of something]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My first reaction was to wish with all my heart that some of the heartland farmers who sent this cacazode to Washington had to survive without the help of illegal aliens and government subsidies.
Then I realized the problem with SCHIP is that it's being sold as health care.
Let's assume this cacazode is right and the bill would have benefited illegal aliens. (It wouldn't have, they get Medicaid if anything, but work with me here.)
If that were true, the SCHIP is really just another version of crop subsidies - illegal aliens are more productive when they're not having to care for sick children, so this subsidizes cheap farm labor and . . .
Screw it. He's a butthead.
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Credit where due . . .
[Read the article: Senate rejects war funds tied to timetable]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let's be clear now, the Senate didn't reject the timetable.
The Senate approved it, it's just that Republicans can block the bill's ultimate passage with a filibuster.
The reason this matters to me personally is that it's the first time I can remember that both the Senate and the House approved something like this, the first time I can't whine about my party's craven ineffectual leadership.
It will take some getting used-to if they keep forcing issues like this. I might even have to make some campaign contributions.
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Making the math work
[Read the article: Mitt Romney's Cabinet math?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You write ". . . The Presbyterians could get a seat, but only if they shared it with the Episcopalians and the Pentacostals."
The obvious solution is to give this seat to a Unitarian.
t.
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Mutilation
[Read the article: When a rose isn't a rose ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What do I think? I think that any man who defends female genital mutilation on religious grounds should have his glans penis removed. Good for the goose . . .
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Policies only?
[Read the article: American politics in bad faith]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Isn't it okay if Romney loses the GOP race because he's a hypocrite whoring to the Christianist Right by disclaiming his positions on divisive issues?
What about Romney losing the GOP race because he's an empty suit, a pretty face fronting a skull where any original idea would die of isolation?
Romney's candidacy doesn't frighten me because he is a Mormon (although his statement this morning that freedom belongs to the religious is scary enough). What's frightening about Romney's candidacy is that he fits the paradigm of recent GOP Presidents (20 of the last 28 years!) so well. He's cosemtically acceptable, intellectually lazy and socially dialed-in.
In other words, he's the perfect replacement for the perfect neo-con tool presently occupying the Oval Office [part-time].
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Slippery slope
[Read the article: The waterboarding show]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Just a thought. Maybe some Democrat whose spine is still in place should introduce a bill outlawing interrogation by pouring melted lead up a person's back passage. My understanding is that this technique was sometimes used during what we still (quaintly) call "the Dark Ages."
Surely a law that bans the indroduction of molten metal into a person's descending colon for purposes of motivating them to reveal secrets is something Democrats can all get behind (sorry)? There might even be a dozen-odd Republicans in the Senate who would vote for it.
I don't know if the President would veto **that** as a short-sighted, feel-good amendment, but I know it would make a hell of a show in Congress.
Any takers? Mr. Kucinich?
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A frightening populist.
[Read the article: Mike Huckabee, leftist]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If you've read Chris Hedges' "American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America," you know that he posits that faux-populism is an essential part of the Christianist movement.
Scaring people and making them feel disenfranchised has always been a good technique for growing a movement. In this case, instead of scaring people and blaming their ills on Jews (as earlier fascist movements did in this country and overseas), they blame ills on the seculars, the irreligious, the God-less. If everybody comes to Jesus, they proclaim, everything will improve. Piety and policy are one.
This sort of thinking is used to justify things like giving families a tax break for sending kids to religious schools instead of public. Or to subsidize home-schooling, one of the least-known triumphs of the Christianist movement.
The Republican leadership may be appalled about Huckabee's success, but his genial accessibility, lack of gravitas and minor-league intellect clearly suit the taste of many Republican voters where presidents are concerned. After Ronald Reagan and two Bushes, why is that surprising?
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Separated at birth?
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is it my imagination, or are Giuliani's endless references to 9/11 starting to resemble Red Foreman's references to his destroyer service in "That '70s Show"?
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Malice?
[Read the article: Andrea Mitchell's strange attack against Clinton]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's hardly news that a Clinton's campaign event might consist largely of union members, and I'm not sure why it is news that people stayed upstairs watching the "reporting" until just before it was time for the speech and cameras.
In any event, the reason Mitchell's reporting was so striking to me is not that she noted what **she** perceived as a "manufactured" character to the celebration. But as I stayed with the NBC coverage, she noted it again, and again, and again, each time feigning mild shock as if she had never seen a campaign event staged for cameras.
If it was an "attack", the aggression lay more in the repetition and tone than the content.
It sure looked like an attack to me, and I'm no Clinton supporter.