Letters to the Editor
Retired Military Patriot
Published Letters: 2270 Editor's Choice: 11
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@ Ktwdawg re: Obama
[Read the article: Douglas Schoen and Hillary's slimy pollsters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]“Your post indicates that you want him to stand up and yell about the atrocities occurring in this country. I agree on principle, in my heart, but my reservations on that are ones of political/election tactics/strategy. Could you elaborate?”
I like Obama’s background and real life experience as qualifications for president. However, I think he has put himself into a political tactic box that has hushed his true voice and hidden his passion and is destroying his chance to show his leadership. He can’t wait until the general election even if he is able to defeat Hillary in the primary.
What Obama is not showing us as a leader is the passion and vision he showed in his speech at the Democratic Convention. You can’t show passion when the things you oppose can’t be talked about. Obama wants unity and much less divisiveness. I do too. You aren’t being divisive when you attack meanness, fear mongering, hypocrisy, inhumanity, corruption, stupidity.
Show you really mean to make a difference by educating voters to what is happening to our election system and that solving the problem takes a lot more than refusing to take lobbyist money. Say you will really do something about money buying votes and our congress by pushing for public supported national elections devoid of the need for elected officials to spend valuable time raising money.
Don’t abstain on MoveOn and Klye-Lierberman votes. Don’t stay virtually silent on civil liberties. Don’t stay silent on the mistreatment of Ahmendinejad especially when you have personal insights that you can share of Arab and Persian cultures. Tell us that we are better citizens and humans when we respect all points of view. That’s what he claims he will do in dealing with other nation’s leaders and this is/was a great opportunity to back up that position.
Don’t give Gen. Petraeus almost a free ride. Instead tell us the dangers to our system when generals become politicians. Say that your ultimate goal is to get all troops out of Iraq even though it won’t happen as soon as we would like. Say that we have to take a hard look at how we have used and misused our military arm of world diplomacy. Tell us that you see the same thing happening with Iran that you warned us about in 2002 when you spoke out about Iraq.
Say that we have to sometimes tell our friends like Israel things they don’t want to hear so that we can change the dynamics and bring about peace. Stand up for a single payer health system but until we reach that goal we can challenge insurers and hospitals and do better for their clients.
Quit leaving all the dastardly deeds of the RWAs and neocons for the general election. We want to know that you feel deeply about the harm they have caused and won’t stand for it in the Senate and as president.
Finally, humanize your points and talk about real people and how what government decides is critical to either saving life or taking life. Don’t seem like you are remaining above the fray. Show us you are one of us. That’s the primary reason that Dubya won twice.
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@Bryan Hayward
[Read the article: Douglas Schoen and Hillary's slimy pollsters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]“RMP - you were a little terse there, sir. Do I understand correctly this isn't snark? You think lower gas prices would result, and that would help retirees. That is what I understood from your message. If so, I agree.”
Not snark. You wanted a boycott instead of a strike and the product that sends the best message is oil. Some students in my hometown wanted BP to not add more pollution to Lake Michigan when building more refining capability and demonstrated at BP stations. A lot of other people and politicians got into the act and BP backed down.
What if citizens refused to buy gas for even just a day or longer and drove to the stations and signed a petition that the price of death and suffering is not worth buying your gas today. We want you to stop making such huge profits and supporting wars to steal gas from the countries that own it. We further want your oil conglomerations to stop giving educational institutions hundreds of millions in bribe money so that real global warning research will be compromised. We want you to be true citizens of the world instead of phony propagandists and robber barons.
Cheaper prices would not result. In fact, we should be paying higher prices so that we will take energy conservation more seriously and stop falling for fake conservation like ethanol from plants that consumes more energy than it saves.
My point on retirees is that we have no job, thus no way to strike.
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Who will pay for this nightmare?
[Read the article: The war president "at peace" with himself]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Reading this makes me sick to my stomach. In time, Bush will be held accountable in American and world eyes because there are millions of present and future anguished victims who know clearly where the criminal lives. Accountable doesn’t mean he will be punished anywhere near to the extent he and his coterie of thugs deserve.
He does seem to value his reputation and place in history and that could be his greatest punishment because of the future universal condemnation by historians and the public that he was our worst president hands down.
Of course even that may not work because he will rationalize that he is right and all those other so called experts don’t understand how justified this war was and given enough time that will be clear to the world as it now is to God.
Sometimes this nightmare that we are living in seems so bizarre to me that I think I will wake up and find out it really didn’t happen. Nightmares anyone?