Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1153 Editor's Choice: 107
-
On not seeing this coming
[Read the article: On to New Hampshire]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I admit to not seeing this coming. I'll be giving a lot of thought in the days to come as to what "this" is. I know the caucus experience is a strange throwback, but I was moved by it. Even Hillary Clinton supporters seemed awed by what Obama had done, as am I.
Hindsight is 20/20. Everyone at the Democratic poker table counted their cards and went with their best bet. If turnout among young Iowans had been abysmally poor for some reason everyone would be saying that Clinton's or Edwards' strategy had clearly been wiser than Obama's.
That's not to say that Obama's success was somehow random. He was shrewd in understanding the cultural forces at play and organized a campaign to take advantage of them. And he gets something important that many older, mainstream liberals do not yet understand — that they have been mired for a quarter century in an enormously destructive false narrative for which their kids, so to speak, are sooner or later going to take them to task.
However Obama was taking the same chance as each of the rest of the candidates — that their own assumptions and strategy were correct — and the only way to know who was right is after the fact. Even then it's not clear how far Obama's success in an easy state will carry him elsewhere — he'll need to work hard every step of the way and prove over and over that he really does understand what he's dealing with. In Edwards and Clinton he has determined rivals with experience in national campaigning, and Clinton in particular has signaled that she has claws she hasn't brought out yet.
(In fact, I wonder if the best thing she could do for Democrats as a whole wouldn't be to start savaging Obama now, every way she can think, and get it out of the way. Religion, coded racial issues like drug use or lawbreaking, whatever. She probably isn't ready to relegate herself permanently to the status of bête noire, though.)
-
Two separate points
[Read the article: Worthless chatter]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It seems like Glenn Greenwald is making two distinct points here.
1) A particular group of reactionary troglodytes was extremely wrong about what was going to happen in Iowa and is probably not worth listening to about anything related to the presidential campaign (to say the very least).
2) Any discussion of who's right or wrong (the "horse-race obsession") is inherently futile and a useless distraction from real issues.
Now, I don't foresee ever objecting to Greenwald's documentation of the follies of the aforementioned troglodytes — it's one of Unclaimed Territory's vital contributions to national political discourse.
And I'm sympathetic with the second point — let's do the experiment, so to speak, and then talk about the results, instead of the other way around.
But aren't the two points contradictory? Greenwald may, like Whitman, be vast and contains multitudes, but I hope that we continue to see more of the "actual real" stuff here — especially if it's in such danger of being forgotten everywhere else.
-
mcsnee on propaganda mills
[Read the article: Last thoughts]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Consistently provides favorable coverage to Clinton while providing unfavorable coverage to her opponents" is equivalent, at least functionally, to "is a wholly owned Clinton propaganda mill."
I guess I disagree that Salon's coverage of Clinton has been consistently favorable, or that its coverage of everyone else has been unfavorable.
Salon's editors are white middle-aged liberal journalists, mostly from the San Francisco Bay Area, and they share their cohort's temperamental inclination to view any liberal-centrist politician favorably and anyone else with suspicion.
All news magazines (to say the least) have their editorial biases. It's inevitable, and unless one defines one's own views according to the publication (which many do, let's be clear), one is always going to be at odds with something or another that one reads.
But a good news magazine is always more than its editorial stance. Salon has a multitude of voices and at least one writer who has written favorably about each Democratic candidate. (Maybe not each one — I can't think of an example for Biden, but I'm willing to defend him as the exception that proves the rule.)
That's what I was trying to get at. Joan Walsh will always have more nice things to say about Clinton than I. That will probably always be the case, and it will definitely never stop her from saying them. I don't expect anything different, and I don't think it's a sign of uncritical, magazine-wide support.
-
Juliebird on "Julie"
[Read the article: Womb for rent]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Julie" felt entitled to direct the surrogate mom's eating, drinking and other habits ...
Well... what Warner cited was the woman's desire to control the behavior of the woman she had hired. I agree that's creepy, but I think it's symptomatic of an overcontrolling puritanical streak in modern American life that goes well beyond this particular case. Think of pre-employment drug screening, for example, or politically-motivated miseducation about sex.
The point was that whatever "Julie" might wish for, control of that sort is impossible. It seems like caveat emptor applies here — if you don't trust the woman you're hiring to not be self-destructive, then maybe you should rethink hiring her.
I assume most of us are against slavery, even of the indentured kind. That's what "Julie" seemed to feel entitled to, and that's, I'll wager, is what was bothering Judith Warner.
Now this I disagree with. Yes, Warner comments on "Julie's" attitude, but most of the article is about how awful the whole arrangement is — awful enough that maybe it should just be outlawed, she seems to want to say but can't quite bring herself to. She basically says she doesn't know what to make of it, and ultimately I agree — it's not about Judith Warner, and her personal view (or mine, for that matter) doesn't matter. It's about the women involved in the transaction, and about the baby.