Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1110 Editor's Choice: 106
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Thought Experiment
[Read the article: The Bush-league economy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... you could imagine he didn't even know there was a housing bust or a credit crunch. I'm almost prepared to believe that of him ...
Heh. "Almost?"
Here's a useful experiment. Suppose it wasn't your country. Suppose it wasn't your people involved and your leaders that you either voted for or failed to successfully vote against -- say if it was Turkmenistan and you were reading about the late great "Padishah Emperor" Niyazov and his increasingly weird and out-of-touch pronouncements.
Supposing all that, would you have any reasonable doubt that the man was delusional? Or that he had deliberately (if not consciously) surrounded himself with people who would protect him from reality?
You wouldn't. So why give Bush a break?
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Nice Opportunity for Romney's Opponents ...
[Read the article: Quote of the Day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... to bring home the fact that these hawks are all chicken.
Think of it as a sign of how 2008 will go for the Democrats. If they find a way to stick Romney's gaffe to him then it bodes well. If not, then we know to expect four more years of the same old wannabe imperial presidency.
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A Little More Complex
[Read the article: The foreign policy community]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The thing one has to understand about foreign policymakers is that, unlike political journalists, they're part of, or party to, the apparatus of government, not critically distant from it. Foreign policy people have a sort of code, part of which states that you serve the elected government of the day irrespective of your own politics.
It was this "code" which led the large part of the American foreign policy apparatus, especially that which existed within the government itself, to reflexively support the Bush regime's projects. Many of them rolled their eyes at Bush's ignorant pronouncements, but that was hardly anything exceptional. They get ignorant pronouncements from politicians all the time, because you, the American people, can't be bothered to educate yourselves well enough to not keep electing idiots.
(Plus it helped significantly that affable, engaged Colin Powell replaced brittle, distant Madeline Albright at the State Department -- from personal observation I honestly think that did a lot to lull the foreign policy crowd into a critical extra few months of happy indifference to Bush.)
The thing is, over the last 6 years there has been a completely unprecedented phenomenon within American foreign policy circles, as diplomats, foreign service operatives, policymakers, and scholars (yes, they're at least as much scholars as economists, which may not be saying much but that's a completely separate subject) have been abandoning their posts, sometimes writing impassioned, desperate cries for help from their fellow citizens in stopping this dude and his degenerate regime.
At the same time there has been an almost as equally unprecedented purge by the regime itself, which has demanded more than just the traditional code of neutrality as the price for continued insidership.
So yeah, the ones that are left on the "inside" are jerkoffs, echoes of Dean Acheson's (ostensibly liberal) cadre that blundered from war to war in Southeast Asia without ever once having an inkling of what they were doing wrong. (And sometimes more than echoes -- I'm sure there are some familiar faces still around.)
But as the recent memo illustrates, there are also competent, energetic, open-minded people in the scene, waiting for a government that recognizes and rewards those characteristics. We Americans have yet to provide them with one, nor have we remained engaged in questions of foreign policy once we do.
It's our right to not give a good god-damn, but let's not complain about what we get if we don't.
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Pay and Pay and Pay
[Read the article: Plastic bags are killing us]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]People pay money for gas to get them and their cars across town to the store so they can pick up their groceries in time to get to the gym, that they also pay for, in order to exercise. And that's not to mention this cost we're all paying for the bags.
Why not just screw the car, screw the gas, the plastic bags, the paper bags, the damn canvas bags, and the gym? Bring a backpack to the store, and schlep your food home in it as God intended.
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So "Never" Wasn't Quite Accurate
[Read the article: Biggest. Corn harvest. Ever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ok, how about "Never, except for this one guy Mitch knows at Monsanto"?
Seriously, the point is that it's never been a policy goal, not that nobody has ever thought about it.
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Better Than Adequate
[Read the article: The truth behind the Pollack-O'Hanlon trip to Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I would like to draw attention to a particular aspect of Glenn Greenwald's interview here.
A lesser investigator -- a mediocre one; a typical thoughtful, liberal, American intellectual -- would have been so warmed by O'Hanlon's frank confession and the tantalizing prospect of that elusive entente cordiale for which such liberal intellectuals have been longing for 6 years that he would have backed off, mollified, and grudgingly turned to other business.
But Greenwald is not looking for cordiality. He's after truth, with the attorney's instinct for the jugular. "Severe sloppiness or bad faith?" he asks, implying of course -- if not outright proving -- the latter.
That is the question of our time, and the sooner we as citizens make the asking of it the central tenet of our public discourse the sooner we will extricate ourselves from this business.
And until we do we deserve everything these pint-size Mussolinis do to us.
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Anonymous: Re. What's Expensive (Now)
[Read the article: Biggest. Corn harvest. Ever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... to the extent natural resources are expensive that's a core aspect of what [agribusiness] must do.
It's good to see that going on, and I appreciate the elucidation. Nevertheless, this doesn't counter the point of public policy. Not all research that's valuable is only so because of, or to the extent of, its current expense in the private sector.
Put another way, Monsanto (eg) pursues regenerative agriculture when natural resource depletion creates a situation on the ground where their margin of return is maximized. This is sound business, and it may even have some crude, indirect, frontier-justice relation to the general good, but it will never be the same as thoughtful, foresighted public agricultural policy, and concomitant investment in public research funding.
That's the point I see in the original article.
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Erratum
[Read the article: Biggest. Corn harvest. Ever]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... to the extent of, its current expense in the private sector.
Should be without "its".