Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 682 Editor's Choice: 9
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@ljwaker53
[Read the article: What should Hillary Clinton do now?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hey guess what.. I'm sure some HRC supporters are okay with labial mutilation, just as some Obama supporters wish that the niggers were still picking our cotton.
Conflating a candidate with their supporters is walking a thin wire, almost as bad as characterizing their values based on who they know (Goldwater, Wright).
That's the fun, difficult and vexing problem with democracy: some, many or even most voters may be assholes, idiots or just plain insane (eg: Kansas).
If through some miracle of, well, a back-room deal Clinton gets the nomination it will piss off a lot of those unwashed, voting idiots. A large number of these plebian vote-tards have never participated in the process before: too young or too black, too jaded or perhaps too legitimately afraid of voting because they view the system as not only stacked up against them, but actively oppressive.
My father is an attorney in Cuyahoga County, Ohio which contains Cleveland and has volunteered his time and services as an election monitoring official. He is unable to publicly confirm any of the claims that have been made regarding voter disenfranchisement in North East Ohio due to ongoing litigation, however I feel like I can, in general, confirm that what he witnessed was extremely troubling.
What is more troubling to me, however, is that word of dirty tactics employed by largely the Republican party (but in some cases both parties) filters down into the urban African American community -- the same community where claims that the CIA has a hand in the AIDS epidemic can gain traction.
Where urban blacks have been discouraged from participating in (national) politics, rural and urban ethnic whites, the so-called red-state blue-collar voters, have been encouraged to vote in spite of their best interests for nearly 50 years.
If you read the letters on salon.com you come away with the impression that this primary is "girls versus blacks." Much ado is made about the unfairness of our male-dominated society and its inherent sexism, and the atrocities committed on a daily basis against women.
Atrocities are committed against women on a daily basis, around the world, and in this country. Yet we have an overtly racist justice system that disproportionately imprisons African-American males, subverts urban voters and manipulates low-income whites into voting for candidates whose platforms are in every way antithetical to Americans of any race or gender struggling to make a living.
So to say that Hillary deserves the nomination because women get a raw deal in America is sexist on its face, and short changes these new voters coming in and participating in the system for the first time ever -- woman, man, black, white, gay, atheist or frakking cylon alike.
I think the people have spoken, overwhelmingly, and they have rallied behind Obama. I know this must be hard for Hillary Clinton to accept, but I am perplexed by her continuing actions which bely an ego-driven campaign and a kind of narrow, tunnel-vision guided purpose which throws reason out the window.
I will vote for whichever Democratic nominee runs against McCain, but I do not believe that we have any chance of winning if Clinton in 2008 pulls a Bush 2000.
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The fallacy of the winner-takes all argument
[Read the article: What should Hillary Clinton do now?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Clinton supporters claim that if Democrats used the Republican system this primary that she would have won long ago.
This is possible, but it is also possible that, knowing the stakes, enough voters would have maintained the bump Obama received in Iowa to clinch his nomination early on.
The cold hard facts in this primary are that a majority of the political zeitgeist in 2006 and going into 2007 had Hillary Clinton as the presumptive nominee before any votes were cast, and the reality is that her lead disappeared and a long-shot candidate came from behind to take a (tenuous however practically decisive) lead.
In 1992 one William Jefferson Clinton, against the odds and the conventional wisdom of the punditry, won the nomination, election and won a second term.
Bill Clinton had a number of factors working in his favor, but one of the most valuable factors that everyone can agree on is the cult of personality surrounding his campaign, the buzz and excitement surrounding it.
I will not be able to sway these straggling Senator Clinton supporters that this is what we need to win, and that Hillary doesn't have it. But the "cult of personality" that Obama detractors like so frequently to cite is exactly what Clinton lacks, and McCain will charm more voters than Hillary will in November.
In the famous words of anonymous source Karl Rove, who would you rather have a beer with? I think even the weary rural or blue collar whites can bring themselves to vote for that black guy with the funny name once they get to know him.
The more I get to know of Hillary, the more I think to myself "I would never be friends with this person, I don't trust this person and I don't want this person to be put in charge."
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Leftwing?
[Read the article: What should Hillary Clinton do now?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What do you mean by leftwing?
That we do not want our spouses, children or parents sent off into a violent war without an end in sight?
That we do not want the government spying on our phone calls, email, text messages and library activity?
That we see Latinos not as an invading army of foreigners in what is arguably their native lands but instead a symptom of a concerted effort to subvert the gains of the labor movement?
That American slave descendants are not right to harbor resentments and distrusts of a government and society which, if not a feeling of superiority, systematically approaches its victims with distrust and fear?
Is it "leftwing" to think that arming all sides of a bloddy conflict is immoral?
Is it "leftwing" to believe that we fomented the resentment and hatred that led to 9/11 exactly in the way that Belgium didn't?
And on and on and on..