Letters to the Editor
Amity
Published Letters: 1114 Editor's Choice: 106
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Armchair Summary
[Read the article: Ask the Pilot]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The accident at Congonhas seems to boil down to a tough runway in marginal conditions which required pilots to do almost everything right in order to manage a successful landing. Whenever you have a situation like that in aviation you're asking for trouble.
No real-world process is perfectly safe, in aviation or otherwise, but as a practical goal what you want is a process for which all, or as many as possible, of the steps have to fail for there to be a disastrous outcome. Put another way, you want a situation where a sequence of failures can be interrupted at any time by a successful, correct action which averts the disaster. You can have a lot of things go wrong, but as long as at least a few things go right you'll be okay.
That's the goal, anyway. When the process breaks down, and you have to get most or all of the steps right to avoid disaster, then it's only a matter of time before someone doesn't nail it spot on, one too many things go wrong -- things that in another situation would still be manageable -- and you wind up with a crash.
It sounds like the regular pilots at Congonhas knew, as pilots generally do, that conditions there were starting to fall into that category, and they were sending up red flags. A better-managed airport would have taken steps then, not after a hundred something deaths.
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Gee, NotOrbitBoy, Now That You Mention It....
[Read the article: The Islamists are coming]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... Salman Rushdie has said many times that the Bush administration is doing more than anything else to feed both militant Islam specifically and general anti-American sentiment around the world.
So, you know, since people like you don't actually have Muslim wingnuts chasing you around on a daily basis trying to kill you, that kind of puts you in an awkward position, doesn't it? It kind of makes you sound like a complete jackass.
Instead of defending your country and your civilization you all are cowering in the corner flinching at shadows. You're a disgrace.
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9/11 Attacks Were a Symptom, Not a Cause
[Read the article: We'll go no more a-Rove-ing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Only the attacks of Sept. 11 gave Rove, Bush and Cheney an atmosphere in which such theories could thrive through the exploitation of fear.
This is a notable assertion in Sidney Blumenthal's characteristically excellent summary of current events in Washington. It's the same assertion seen across the entire spectrum of liberal thinking about the Bush legacy -- part of the story that liberals are telling themselves to understand what happened. "It was that damn event," we say. "It came out of the blue, it was a stroke of ill luck that made the hapless Bush untouchable, it got us all and we had no choice but to be taken by the tide."
And it's utterly, dangerously wrong. Blumenthal makes it seem like the Bush regime before September 11, 2001 was hanging on by its fingernails, and in doing so underplays the extent to which it was in reality already well-ensconced and firmly in control of the apparatus of national discourse. The regime's failure to protect the country from a predictable and well-understood threat from al Quaeda went uninvestigated, unchallenged, and unequestioned by the Democratic party and the liberal intelligentsia. No more obvious indication could be wished for that Rove's work was already well done by then.
His legacy should be one of shame, as much on those who enabled and tolerated his shenanigans for so long -- especially before 9/11, when that tragedy and all the others since might still have been averted -- as on the man himself.
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No Clue
[Read the article: Bush's tangled arms deal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bush's regime has never shown the slightest aptitude for geopolitics. Remember the bumbling bluster against China that blew up in the US' face once the Chinese were holding American airmen captive? The neoconservative obsession with burning down Russian-American relations over the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty even in the absence of any actual missile threat? Bush was already marching American influence off a cliff well before the September 11 debacle and the ensuing madness.
One would have expected some kind of entrenched, organized opposition from within the national political class over the past 7 years simply on the basis of this persistent, fundamental incompetence. Yet the irrational myth of Republican prowess in foreign policy, and the equally irrational but dismayingly stubborn fear of Democrats to aggressively engage the nation on these issues, seem largely intact no matter how hard Bush's people fall.
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AnthonyB: The Jewish State
[Read the article: Bush's tangled arms deal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why not follow the name Saudi Arabia ... with the moniker "the Muslim State"?
You honestly don't seem like a troll, so maybe you really do need to have this clarified.
When listing the States of the Middle East, all but two of which are formally or culturally Muslim, the term "Muslim" imparts no distinction, while the term "Jewish" is perfectly unambiguous.
By the same token, if one were (for whatever reason) listing Iran, Turkey, Israel, and Iraq, one could unambiguously refer to "the Arab State" -- to the extent, anyway, that Iraq can be considered an organized polity anymore.
But even beyond that, come on -- while Israel is often called many things unfairly, it certainly was intended by its founders, and is recognized today by its citizens, as uniquely the Jewish State, the only one in the world.
Pick a better fight.