Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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mattcable: examples?
[Read the article: The scruffy charms of an insecure president]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... it just doesn't make sense that George W. Bush would be completely devoid of any charm, skills, or intelligence.
Can you elaborate on this argument? Why doesn't it make sense? (Here's a hint: what qualifications does one have to meet to become President?)
Let's even grant the question of personal charm (which is granting a lot -- there are plenty of people in the US and abroad who find Bush personally repugnant). Can you give any examples of charming public behavior on Bush's part? Eloquence, deftness, graciousness?
Can you give any examples of skillful, adroit, or statesmanlike actions or statements from Bush?
Can you point to any moments in which Bush was bright, articulate, or demonstrated any sort of intelligent insight?
I honestly can't think of anything, and while I'm sincerely interested in what you come up with, as you can probably tell I'm highly skeptical.
The man was chosen by his party to be a figurehead, a cipher, not an actual functioning chief executive. There's nothing wrong with that per se -- plenty of republics elect (or otherwise inherit) heads of state entirely separately from the process of electing their chief executives. But let's not go crazy trying to imbue a figurehead with qualities of real leadership that he neither possesses nor has ever been obliged to acquire.
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Vengeance and racism ... but that's not the whole story
[Read the article: The real lessons of 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The grand justification of "spreading democracy in the Middle East" merely provided a palatable cover for vengeance and racism.
Kamiya is absolutely on the mark here. It would not surprise me if a substantial number of Americans identified any Arabic-sounding name (Gamel Nasser, Hosni Mubarak, Idi Amin, Karim Abdul Jabbar..) with al Quaeda's attacks -- and not from ignorance, but from a crude but conscious equation of anything "Muslim" with the enemies of America. Liberals fail to appreciate this fact, choosing instead to roll their eyes and bemoan the ignorance of the American public, at their own peril.
But elsewhere in his analysis Kamiya makes a mistake which is unfortunately common to much of his writing about the war. We have not been seeing a pattern to the Bush regime's cynicism, duplicity, and utter lack of clue only "for eight months." We saw it in the planning for the war, we saw it in the "Axis of Evil" speech, we saw it in Bush's gutting of the American effort against al Quaeda in the months before the World Trade Center attacks, we even saw it in his mindless pronouncements during the 2000 election.
In short, despite Kamiya's attempt to narrow the exposure to only the recent past, we have no excuse for not seeing any of this coming, instead of sitting around entranced.
Also, it's important to address Kamiya's implication that bigotry alone was what blinded Americans after the attack. Yes, that's part of it, but bigotry was part of a much larger burden of ignorance that afflicted all Americans. We as a people didn't understand the slightest bit of what had happened to us or why. Even (ostensibly) educated, liberal Bush-critics, Kamiya among them, couldn't bring themselves to ask the obvious question of how the Bush regime had so incompetently managed national security as to allow the attacks to succeed -- or why we should listen, even for a moment, to the guy who was responsible as he told us why it was real important that we invade Iraq next.
Until we Americans, liberal as well as conservative, can face that failure and understand what it means about us, we will be doomed to repeat history.
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Sulzer and psyberdawg
[Read the article: Documenting Gen. Petraeus' record of statements about the war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sulzer:
The press needs to report what was said, and put it in context (what was said before that is relevant). Assigning credibility is opinion.
Very well, I stand corrected. "General Petraeus blah blah blah" should ideally be replaced with "General Petraeus, who has long history of being wrong in both his description and prediction of events in Iraq, though you can make up your own mind about whether that means he's full of shit or simply an idiot, blah blah blah ..."
Seriously, "putting in context" doesn't have to mean "posting a history logfile," all due respect to Greenwald's and others' efforts to do just that. If it's simply a fact that the man is full of it and has always been repeating what the White House says, there's no reason not to say that. Period. Footnote the references.
psyberdawg:
there's no way the press is going to go from their current stance of praising Petraeus up the wazzoo, to calling him a liar in every article.
We all know what the traditional press is and is not actually capable of saying. Let's take it as given that we're talking about what Greenwald -- and me, and you -- thinks the press should say.
So given that, I absolutely do think that any responsible journalist worth the name should call Petraeus a liar in every article -- at least whenever he is lying, which is every time he opens his mouth. Why is it so hard to say that? We don't have trouble referring to popular figures as "disgraced" when they misbehave, or theories and their proponents as "discredited" when they're proven wrong.
And as for being a partisan -- what, me? All I want to see is the truth. If reality has a well-known liberal bias, is that my fault? ;)