Letters to the Editor
Settembrini
Published Letters: 155
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Perhaps that's unfair to moonbats
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm a moonbat because I'm a leftist and I'm proud of that, but philosophically I've always been a pessimist even though that school has been out of favor during the 20th century.
Martin is kooky, but kooky in the Cloud Cukoo Land kind of way. There are wingnuts who do this. Can you spot 'em?
Aristophanes, The Birds.
Pisthetairos is at first an ordinary man with whom the audience can sympathize in his quest for a utopia. However, Cloudcuckooland transforms from an egalitarian state to a dictatorship as Pisthetairos acquires a fancy for tyranny.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birds_%28play%29
Cloud Cuckoo Land refers to an (unrealistically) idealistic state where everything is perfect. ("You're living in Cloud-cuckoo-land.") It hints that the person referred to is naïve, unaware of reality or deranged in holding such an optimistic belief. The reference is to the play, The Birds by the Athenian playwright Aristophanes, in which Peisetairus (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Trusting") and Euelpides (which can be translated to mean "Mr. Hopeful") with the help of Tereus, tired of the Earth and Olympus, decide to erect a perfect city between the clouds, to be named Cloud-Cuckoo-Land (Νεφελοκοκκυγία -- Nephelokokkygia).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_cuckoo_land
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@Kitt
[Read the article: War advocates like Anne-Marie Slaughter demand that you forget the past]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can't possibly say anything about that paragraph that would make it come off any more stupid than it comes off standing on its own without comment.
Martin seems to think it is just as easy to build something as it is to tear it down.
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There were at least three
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]references to Hunter S. in the last few days:
This is the only one I could find (Bill Owen on Lessons Learned) but I don't think it's the one you mean. Odd because Thompson was working for Muskie. Someone will find it.
It was the content that raised eyebrows and tempers. His book on the 1972 presidential campaign involving, among others, Edmund Muskie, Hubert Humphrey and Nixon was famous for its scathing opinion.
Working for Muskie, Thompson wrote, "was something like being locked in a rolling box car with a vicious 200-pound water rat." Nixon and his "Barbie doll" family were "America's answer to the monstrous Mr. Hyde. He speaks for the werewolf in us."
Humphrey? Of him, Thompson wrote: "There is no way to grasp what a shallow, contemptible and hopelessly dishonest old hack Hubert Humphrey is until you've followed him around for a while."
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/02/21/entertainment/main675216.shtml
Bill Owen... @ RMP Is Bush on Ibogaine?
In Fear and Loathing: On The Campaign Trail '72, [Hunter S.] Thompson wrote about a candidate he wanted to take down: "word leaked out that some of [Ed] Muskie's top advisors had called in a Brazilian doctor who was said to be treating the candidate with "some kind of strange drug" that nobody in the press corps had ever heard of."
Thompson later explained, "I started the rumor, but there was a rumor," thus insisting on the veracity of his reporting. Describing an awkward stump speech in Miami, he wrote: "It is entirely conceivable -- given the known effects of Ibogaine -- that Muskie's brain was almost paralyzed by hallucinations at the time; that he looked out at that crowd and saw gila monsters instead of people, and that his mind snapped completely when he felt something large and apparently vicious clawing at his legs."
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/brainstorm/200802/hunter-the-bullfighter
The effects of ibogaine have been described as dreaming while awake. It's as good an explanation for bush as any. Either that or we could go with that demon from hell meme.
Don't blame me, I am just reporting the "rumor" LOL.
-- Bill Owen
http://letters.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/20/war/permalink/1f7591f8d4b8170adbfb1bb8fe6aeff2.html
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This it?
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Read "Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72" - the chronicle of his Rolling Stone election coverage - and you find that his diagnosis of journalistic dysfunction hasn't aged a day: "The most consistent and ultimately damaging failure of political journalism in America has its roots in the clubby/cocktail personal relationships that inevitably develop between politicians and journalists." He cites as a classic example the breathless but belated revelations of the mental history of George McGovern's putative running mate, the Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton - a story that had long been known by "half of the political journalists in St. Louis and at least a dozen in the Washington press corps." This same clubby pack would be even tardier on Watergate, a distasteful assignment left to a pair of lowly police-beat hacks at The Washington Post.
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It's from Thompson's
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Great Shark Hunt: Strange Tales From a Strange Time
Google books:
http://tinyurl.com/3yuvlp