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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Published Letters: 118 Editor's Choice: 12
Kate O'Beirne is what's called in certain circles a Monday Morning Quarterback. How easy is it to look back on the last 30 years of a movement that began a heckuva longer time ago than that, and find wrong turns, dead ends, dropped balls , and crossed signals.
If she really wants to have anything to say about feminism and its effects, she oughtn't be so quick to refuse to look where it is today, or to profess uncaring about where it's heading in the future.
As to the real effects of feminism in the last 30 years, I would correct her one one very specific statement: without the feminist movement, she would NOT have been a lawyer. She might have been a brassy, opinionated broad with a "duty" fixation, but she wouldn't have been a lawyer.
And girls themselves, as well.
What we ought to recognize - and celebrate - is the difference between boys and girls. We develop as humans along different arcs and toward different ideal contributive talents in humanity's dance of life.
Whether you are a boy or a girl, smarter is always better than not smart, hardworking better than lazy, kind better than mean.
What's so hard about this stuff for so many people?
With 30 to 40 years of overindulgence in cigarettes, alcohol, and anti depressants, perhaps, I could see finding it a stretch getting jiggy with a co-ed.
The 18 - 25 year-old female human is just about god's piece-de-resistance, whereas the deadline journalist is not.
That said, anyone would be squeamish about doing it with someone who repulsed them. Somehow I doubt there's a crisis in the land of consenting adults.
Nancy Pelosi just can't help representing everything that is wrong with the Democratic party; watching and listening to her provide a great tutorial on exactly how not to go about turning the neo-conservative tide under which the people of this nation are being swept to poverty and irrelevance.
First of all, why even address the hypothetical "should the Democrats gain control of Congress"? The answer to any question so prefaced should always be, "we'll address that when it comes to pass."
At this stage, it makes no sense to either take impeachment off the table or leave it on, because without control of congress, the question is moot. There is no right answer that will either galvanize the 70% of the population who feel the President is doing a piss-poor job, or mollify the 30% who still can't see him for the mendacious incompetent he is.
Ms. Pelosi would do well to just keep her mouth shut in the absence of an affirmative plan for leading her party and her constituents to the high ground.
I don't have a TV -- well that's not literally true, as I own a cathode-ray tube device for viewing home movies and select children's fare on DVD -- and I rarely ever make it through an entire Heather Havrilesky article because they are generally too long, and the subject matter too foreign to hold my attention.
I'll say this, however: HH is a fine writer with acute insight and understanding of both the culture TV mirrors and the humans who populate and consume it.
Her appropriation of the Taepodong motif is one of the more brilliant things I've read recently.
Indeed, if you are the Taepodong who watches alot of television or cares about its larger "meaning" in the least, you have no business taking Ms. H to task fro her work here.
It goes hand-in-glove, as it were.
Spencer is absolutely correct to point out the war in Iraq was hardly one w hadn't anticipated. While in point of actual fact he may not have personally anticipated it, clearly, most of those close to him like Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, et al, couldn't wait to be at war in Iraq from the very get-go.
Another, perhaps less significant quibble, would be with the characterization of w as a "goober" from the "frontier." It may be that the man is from Texas, however he is also "from" one of the blue-bloodiest East Coast families in the annals of the nation's history. He attended prep-school in the East, and bluffed his way through two of the country's most staid and mannered institutions of higher education.
By all rights, he was exposed to every convention of polite society and "good breeding" from the earliest days of his childhood. Whereas the rough-hewn edges of personal comportment exhibited by men such as Lincoln and Johnson might be winked at given their century and their backgrounds, w has neither to fall back on.
Either his "goober from the frontier" schtick is just that, or he really is a mannerless lout despite the advantages of his wealthy and privileged upbringing. In any case, he comes out a loser in the historical record.
You may be slightly ahead of the curve. In time Americans who speak Mandarin will have the exotic and bankable cachet bi-lingual talent in Spanish -- and to a lesser extent French, German, or Russian -- has today.
Mandarin speakers already command a huge default premium here, for which demand will doubtlessly rise in the forseeable future. But it's hard to imagine a Peitou district for Mainland Chinese sprouting up anytime soon near Whichta or West Covina.
If a few hundred fun-loving and adventurous young Chinese people manage to descend on San Francisco, L.A., or New York for a year or two at a time, and are able to support themselves in relative style and comfort (as similarly situated Americans have done for a generation in Taiwan, Japan, and Korea), well, we'll ALL be better off.
My guess, though, is the secret rooms and inner workings of China's ascendance to economic superpower status will remain inscrutable to the average American for quite a while yet.
Another certainty is that railbirds of a certain age will sorely miss Hunter S. Thompson this time around.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
