Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1114 Editor's Choice: 106
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From the horse's mouth
[Read the article: "Broken Government"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In surveying all of the Republican contenders for the GOP nomination, I have found that to the man, they all are far more authoritarian than even the most authoritarian of the Democrats.
This message is not from some "crazy liberal" like John Edwards or Howard Dean, but from John Dean, himself a notoriously authoritarian Republican.
Think about what that means. Their own guys are going blue in the face trying to warn America that the GOP is literally in the grip of mass insanity and must be stopped at all costs -- and you liberals are still sitting there, blinking uncomprehendingly, saying to yourselves, "Well... um... when he says mass insanity, maybe he means, you know, kind of metaphorically... maybe? Because, wow, 'must be stopped,' that sounds so, you know... extreme."
You must make this stop. That means volunteering, educating yourself, voting in the primary of whatever party your blessed little heart leads you to, and then for the love of whatever you believe in make sure the Republicans are defeated in 2008, even if that means voting for Clinton or Obama or whoever you hate because they're so much less than the perfect candidate of your dreams.
There was an old lady who was supervising the poll in her African-American inner city district when I was working for a monitoring organization last election. With broken equipment and not enough paper ballots from a corrupt county the volunteer staff was doing its best to handle lines that went out the door and down the block. I asked her anxiously how long they would be able to keep it up and she said, "Honey, I grew up in the South. We didn't get to vote back then. We'll stay open all night if we have to, and if they want to shut us down they can just try."
Meanwhile, so-called progressives whine and moan about how little voting matters, and they're just not going to bother because it's all the same no matter who wins. Pathetic.
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A Venerable Tradition
[Read the article: Petraeus' Pentagon skeptics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm on record as someone who wasn't crazy about the schoolyard play on Petraeus' name ...
"Schoolyard" name-calling in politics is as old as Adams calling Washington a tyrant or Jefferson calling Adams a pig. Bloodless politeness and restraint is historically anomalous and a bad tactic in public discourse, especially if you are (as liberals are in America) already on the defensive.
Besides, the shoe fits. What's the problem?
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Gary Owen: Can you, now?
[Read the article: Petraeus' Pentagon skeptics]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You can convince [the American middle, the swing voters] with facts and logic.
This is frankly a ridiculous assertion. The last 30 years of national politics ought to be sufficient refutation of this claim on its face -- neither the facts nor the logic of Reagan's absurd economic policy, the sale of arms for hostages, the S&L scandal, the "Contract with America", the Lewinsky scandal, and the pathetic excuse for foreign national security policies of the present regime have ever for one second influenced any "swing" voter in this country.
But why should they? Facts and logic have only a tenuous relationship to how liberals vote and what they stand for, as leaders like Tip O'Neill and Tom Daschle, the bipartisan support for the Patriot Act, and the unquestioned acceptance of the entire Bush agenda after the World Trade Center attacks all indicate.
I'm not so cynical as to believe that American voters can never be educated, and I emphatically don't believe that you can't present Americans with facts and logic, but to do so you must catch and hold their attention. So long as you keep your nose in the air and refuse to sully yourselves with facile, immature attention-getting strategies because they're somehow beneath the level of discourse you aspire to, you will lose. Period.
Maybe if the liberal intelligentsia in this country were actually capable of a level of discourse worth aspiring to, I would feel differently. But the appalling ignorance which has crippled the educated liberal establishment since long before Bush gives a lie to any such pretense. I mean, we're talking about a group of people who, after ten years of continuous attacks by al Quaeda and explicit warnings from their own man Clinton, still hadn't connected the dots and were caught utterly flat-footed on September 11.
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Congratulations
[Read the article: Salon and IFC: Beyond the Multiplex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Good for Salon.
Also, it's nice to know how to pronounce "O'Hehir" and "Zacharek".
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Irrational
[Read the article: Transgenic public relations: Why is it so hard? ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]And you call me irrational?
What is irrational, of course, is the implication that even after a consensus among corporate-funded researchers emerges, embraced by the sci-tech press, and baptized by corporate-friendly public regulatory authorities, that we the people should still be skeptical.
All those institutions, all that money, all those employees on the payroll -- surely they couldn't all be making up complete horseradish together. Because that kind of widespread criminality would surely lead to overwhelming public pressure for investigations, and lawsuits, and massive political and regulatory reform ...
... right?