Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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Quacks like a duck
[Read the article: An Iran bombshell for Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I suspect [the leadership of the intelligence community] were the ones who really insisted on this. They were deciding to do it for their own sake and credibility.
Are we talking on the level of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell?
We must be. I don't know that for a fact, but I think we must be.
This is an extraordinary claim! The Bush regime's hand-picked successor to John Negroponte is in open revolt against the White House?
I would love to believe that the US national security apparatus has fought its way free of the cabal over which Bush has blithely presided, but such claims, as the saying goes, require extraordinary evidence, and this interview doesn't provide it (beyond that it "must be").
It's more likely — and certainly more consistent with history — that the White House has reversed its policy (probably realizing that it really doesn't have much of a military option with Iran) and all of the sudden attention the mainstream press is paying to the latest intelligence estimate is just so many talking points.
Bush will declare diplomacy to have been his goal all along, while long-term prospects for rekindling the bellicosity will be preserved by simultaneously discrediting the intelligence estimate and eventually burying it.
That's not to say that the intelligence estimate is wrong, merely that it's hard to believe that right or wrong are any more important to the people calling the shots than they ever have been. If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, and has turned out to be a duck every other time, why should we think it's a goose?
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Does it ever "make sense"?
[Read the article: "Their 40s just seemed to sneak up on them"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Does it ever really, actually, "make sense" to have children? The world is full of people who come up with all kinds of reasons to have kids now, have kids later, wait until such-and-such a milestone or life event or savings goal or what have you — but at the end of it all is one actually any better prepared for children than otherwise? Is there any time of life when having a child is not basically the equivalent of experiencing a major personal catastrophe? An explosion of noise, confusion, mess, and panic not unlike a bomb? When is a "good" time for that sort of thing?
It seems to me that what it boils down to is screwing up the courage you need to do something scary, and the real question for each of us is how we handle that kind of challenge. Some of us find courage after saving enough money to feel secure, others by achieving a degree of order in their lives, still others by realizing personal goals. No matter what, in the end you still take a deep breath and throw yourself into something for which you are fundamentally unprepared. Some people just do it. Some people wait. Some people don't at all — perhaps they have enough other scary things going on.
So the question of whether women (or men) are "waiting too long" to have children is in some sense akin to asking whether one is waiting too long to dive into freezing water. You do it when you do it, you know?
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Why Romney's religion is relevant
[Read the article: This is not Romney's Kennedy moment]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What's striking about Andrew O'Hehir's analysis is that it illuminates and perhaps explains Romney's peculiarly chameleon-like politics. The modern Mormon experience in America is very much the contradiction that O'Hehir describes — a group of people who wholeheartedly embrace the idea of their own uniqueness and the exclusive validity of their doctrine also crave the enveloping comfort of social and cultural conformity. Part of it is presumably a long-standing social survival instinct, and part of it just a good old-fashioned craving to be part of the herd.
It also sounds like the standard political personality magnified by an order of magnitude. So despite being secular and (relatively) liberal in liberal Massachussets and then making the jaw-dropping overnight transition to Christian conservatism when wooing Christian conservatives, Romney probably feels that he's being completely consistent.
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Who will do the facing up?
[Read the article: Romney: "Freedom requires religion" ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can't help hoping Romney's speech fails to soothe religious conservatives, because the sooner the Republican Party faces up to the destructive cost of its electoral dependence on religious extremists, the better off our country will be.
This is nicely put, but perhaps a bit optimistic — the Republican Party is its religious extremists at this point, largely because liberal Republicans (in at least the broader sense of the term "liberal," especially including its anti-sectarian implications) have been part of the same abdication of responsibility of which liberals in general are guilty.
But more generally, yes — if they start losing these guys' enthusiasm will crumple like tissue paper, and either the GOP will return to its (comparatively) secular roots or something will replace it.
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Serve time... and then keep serving?
[Read the article: Sex offender alert!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Of course, for someone who has served his or her time and is trying to get on with life, it doesn't seem fair.
It's not! Either someone has served time suitable to the crime they committed, after which they should be free and clear, or they haven't — in which case they should still be in prison.
We can't have it both ways. If we decide that it's appropriate for a convicted child molester to be punished for their entire lives, then give them a life sentence. Making room for them would of course require a painful choice to release other criminals early — but despite the obvious menace of those guilty of smoking pot or driving while black somehow I think our country would survive if we let a few of them go.
And if we can't, or we don't actually feel that life is an appropriate sentence, then that's our decision. That's what it means to live in a society ruled by law, rather than fear and shadows.
And as for the threat to public life, forget about what happens if an actual "tagged" sex offender is wandering around. Think about hackers.