Letters to the Editor
Susan Wood
Published Letters: 379 Editor's Choice: 27
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Boiling the frog
[Read the article: The latest revelations of lawbreaking, torture and extremism ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glen: First, a small but fairly important editing correction. You wrote: "they have endorsed and legalized this behavior, investigated, outlawed or punished it." Obviously, you meant ". . . RATHER THAN investigated, outlawed, etc."
You've articulated something that has worried me at least since the revelations from Abu Ghraib; when a scandal like that first comes to light, we are shocked, but then learn to accept it. We all know how you can boil a frog to death without causing him to save himself by jumping out of the water -- just increase the temperature gradually. I'm hoping that American democracy isn't yet a dead frog.
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The fact remains, he was entrapped.
[Read the article: Maybe the "wide stance" was a better argument]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And the ACLU should get on it. Why aren't these morality police out trolling for the trolls who make offensive sexual propositions to women in public? And I don't mean bars, I mean to total strangers on the street.
Nancydrew, Craig may be a rich, white Senator, but he's also apparently either gay or bisexual, which means that both the constabulary and his Republican colleagues consider him fair game. So don't get too optimistic about justice for all.
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Why is this guy still a Republican?
[Read the article: Craig: I won't resign after all]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]He saw clearly enough who his real friends aren't. Why doesn't he resign from the party, declare himself an independent, and caucus with the Democrats, thus improving their majority, marginalizing Holy Joe, and sticking it, as Mizbinkley would so eloquently say, to the hypocritical snobs in the GOP who have been sucking up (don't say it, Mizbinkley) to David Vitter, but wouldn't get behind Craig (don't say that, either).
And yes, it would be beautiful if he told a few tales about Republican on Republican action in the Congressional men's rooms.
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This goes a long way toward explaining
[Read the article: The liberal news media]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]why Couric never even mentioned the New York Times story about the secret torture memos on the day they broke the story last week. But neither did any other major network, so she was hardly alone. The term "liberal media" makes sense if you're Ann Coulter or Rush Limbaugh, raging that the American media has not yet become a perfect clone of Pravda in its ability to parrot an uncritical party line. But to anyone of normal intelligence, the term is ludicrous.
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But if the Pentago screwed up,
[Read the article: Loose links sink ships]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]it will be absolute heresy to say so, because we Must Not Insult Our Brave Men and Women In Uniform.
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A funny name and a place associated with knee-jerk hostility
[Read the article: A "loyal Bushie" surveys the field]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]are certainly enough to put off the 30% of dead enders who still believe the Republican party line. I guess the ghastly Ann Coulter does know her audience when she tries to torpedo Obama's candidacy by harping on the fact that his middle name is Hussein.
Remember back in '00 when Republicans were gloating about how great it was to have "the adults back in charge?"
Sigh.
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Clinton "paralyzed the government?"
[Read the article: The paranoid withdrawal fantasy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Give me a break. It was the Republican Congress, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who were determined to kneecap the Clinton Presidency, and ideally end it prematurely, on any possible pretext they could find. When the Whitewater "scandal" turned out to be nothing, when they couldn't gin up a murder case out of Foster's suicide no matter how they tried, they just kept on digging until they found something. And there isn't a President in history who wouldn't have had at least one sexual indiscretion or personal scandal of some sort that couldn't have been used to trap him into a lie. Starr knew all along, of course, that his carefully sprung perjury trap would never be enough to impeach Clinton; the idea was to blackmail him into quitting by threateneing to publish a huge, sexually explicit dossier recording every detail of his fooling around with Monica. Well, wrong -- Clinton said, essentially, "publish and be damned," and Starr did, and he was.
What is it about neurotic, damaged, self-hating women like Ann Coulter, Maureen "Mowdy Doody" Dowd, and Camille Paglia that makes them so rabidly, irrationally hate-filled about Hillary Clinton? The spectacle of a successful, intelligent, independent-minded professional woman with a husband and a daughter just seems to send them ballistic. Yes, I know, meow meow meow, but it's pretty mild compared to what these three sick harridans have been screeching about Hillary for 16 years.
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Cameljockey
[Read the article: The paranoid withdrawal fantasy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"All I care about is Muslims dying. That's a good thing."
That is almost identical to what Osama bin Laden said about the deaths of 3000 Americans after 9/11. Are you sure he's not your twin, separated at birth?
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Billireland, let me explain something to you about geography.
[Read the article: The paranoid withdrawal fantasy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mesopotamia has always been an ethnically fragmented, disunited region, because it has no defensible natural borders. That simple, intractable fact has dictated much of the region's history since about 5000 B.C., long before Islam, long before the Sunni-Shia split, long before oil. An American occupation won't make a fundamentally indefensible region "more secure," not in 10 years or 100. A little rudimentary familiarity with history and geography would have warned the Bush-Cheney-Neocon cabal what kind of a trap they were walking into, but they were too arrogant and too sure of their own rightness to listen. Now that we're there, we have no good alternatives, but if there's going to be a "bloodbath" when we withdraw that's worse than the one we're perpetrating now, it's going to happen no matter how long we wait. Bush blew it. Live with it.
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Correction, New York Times.
[Read the article: So, are the Marines "phony soldiers," too?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Pulling the Marines out of Iraq would leave that war in the hands of the Army AND Blackwater, but mostly Blackwater. And we know how well they've been doing at winning hearts and minds. One of the reasons the Marines may want out is because they've seen Blackwater's cynical ineptitude undercut their efforts so many times. The Marines were making real progress at establishing a rapport with the people in Fallujah before those clowns blundered into town and blew it.
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Hey, you expect pundits to talk about ISSUES?
[Read the article: Obama: A "rock star" can't win for losing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sheesh, that means doing homework. It's easier and more fun to pontificate about haircuts, whether candidates laugh too much, and of course, whether they're too loose or too stiff (either one will be used as a liability of course) on the campaign stump. Come on, guys, this is a Presidential election, and That's Entertainment! Don't expect serious thought, it's not like human lives are at stake here or anything.