Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1114 Editor's Choice: 106
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Two great tastes...
[Read the article: Tom the Dancing Bug]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What's better than a comic that brings us both "Billy Dare" and "Super Fun-Pak?" A comic that does them at the same time!
I suppose that hoping for God-Man to show up is a little fannish.
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Only kinda
[Read the article: Falling for StandUpGirl.com]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It looks like the Web site of a troubled teen mother.
The site's main copy reads like the heartfelt writing of teen mothers in the same way that ad copy on a second-rate corporate site reads like sincere customer testimonials. The photos scream "generic image catalog" and the writing styles are all too similar — or are meticulously adorned with carefully placed misspellings.
After a quick perusal of some of the "letters" I doubt anything connected with the project is authentic in any way — with the possible exception of their celebrity quotes and medical imagery, though even those are questionable just by association.
The combination of slick and generic in the site design, the content, everything, is way, way too unconvincing, even without a "whois standupgirl.com" check. I won't say it's never possible to fake sincerity in presentation, but it's certainly beyond these guys.
Which shouldn't be surprising. Rigid, authoritarian ideology makes for bad art, no matter what one's politics are.
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Salon should step up
[Read the article: Not asked, not answered]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Salon is getting more into video these days, right? What better way to make a splash than a "counter-debate?" Select a bunch of video questions that Salon's editors would rather have seen CNN ask, and then give the candidates — Republican, Democratic, Green, Constitution, whatever — a chance to respond, preferably in video clips of their own. War Room meets Video Dog.
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Only a matter of time
[Read the article: Hostages taken at Clinton office]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It was really only a matter of time before the assassination attempts started again. It's depressing, though, that the primaries aren't even over.
The same sociopathic matrix of right wing talk show, political leadership, and craven authoritarian impulse that we have today gave us multiple attempts on the Clinton's lives through their years in the White House. A sitting US Senator even openly threatened to have Clinton's husband killed, in what must surely have been a postbellum first.
Maybe it's inevitable that we brush those things off, that we let ourselves be lulled into forgetting how extreme the right wing has gotten, or perhaps simply still is, in our country.
I can't imagine, though, that Clinton has the same luxury.
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On judging too early
[Read the article: Hostages taken at Clinton office]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Right-wing pundits say we need to threaten Democrats with physical violence.
Right-wing radio says that Clinton particularly needs to die.
Republican politicians say we need to put Clinton in a rocket and launch her into space.
Right-wing symps call Clinton a fascist, a threat to the nation, and say that her family needs to be exterminated.
Would-be assassins shoot automatic weapons at the Clintons and fly planes into their house in order to kill them.
Some members of her own party hate her so much that they say they'd rather their party lose than see her win.
Let's put it this way: given that history, in what other country in the world would you then characterize a suicide bomber showing up at the same politician's campaign headquarters as somehow not part of the same pattern?
Take your time if you want, but this isn't rocket science. Whatever this guy's personal issues are, the fact is that the Clintons always end up the target. That's not coincidence.
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Glimpse into the reality behind the security industry
[Read the article: Joe Conason responds]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]One of the clear takeaways of this entire episode (not the Conason-Walsh dialogue, which Salon is taking in an interesting direction by conducting it partly in public — I mean the actual issue with Giuliani) is that nobody who's in the know in the US takes this whole "security thing" seriously.
Qatar is fairly democratic as Arab monarchies go, and hardly a hotbed of Islamic revolution. Nevertheless any peninsular state is going to have educated people with connections to al Qaeda in some form or another; it's the sort of thing that you have to figure anyone in the security biz over there is going to know about.
The fact that Guiliani appears utterly unconcerned about who he does business with suggests that he, too, knows full well that the American operation in Afghanistan all but eradicated bin Laden's Qaeda. The people who are left — the vast majority of the militants who passed through al Qaeda's camps over the ten years or so that they were open — were by necessity, and possibly by intention, trained to go home and raise holy hell there. War against America wasn't what they signed up for — they generally have more immediate grudges they want to settle.
Basically, what Giuliani knows and most of the rest of us are still having a hard time with is that the threat by al Qaeda to American domestic safety is nonexistent. It remains a useful myth for keeping the American people in line and responsive to certain keywords and images but is otherwise a joke. All the action is overseas, in places where actual terrorists live and work and where you can mix it up and make a fortune protecting government officials from locals, locals from foreigners, and foreigners from government officials all in turn.
That's not to say that Muslim (or other) fanatics won't ever be back again — experience has shown that if you leave a big enough power vacuum for long enough in central Asia, craziness starts congealing like leftover fry oil into something solid and entirely unwholesome. But in the meantime we can learn a thing or two by following what Rudy does, not what he says.
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Nulla Sallus on foolishness
[Read the article: Hostage situation ends peacefully]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Don't you feel foolish now ...
Uh, no, I now feel what I assume any decent person would feel — relieved, that the guy couldn't or didn't get his hands on an actual bomb.