Letters to the Editor
Goedel
Published Letters: 104 Editor's Choice: 6
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Kennedy's Cuban Missile Crisis
[Read the article: Arthur M. Schlesinger's playbill for the American century]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]My title gives John F. Kennedy ownership of the so-called Cuban missile crisis and ownership was his, just as Bush now owns Iraq.
In reading praise of him for his dealing with the crisis and averting possible nuclear war, we should all remember that Kennedy caused the problem. He sent the Cuban exiles to invade Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, when he took office. He did this on the advice of Allen Dulles, brother of Eisenhower's Secretary of State, John Foster.
Now Eisenhower was certainly not a man of peace, though he managed to end the Korean War. He toppled the democratically elected, thought Leftist, governments of Guatemala and Iran. He failed to support the Geneva Accords by holding the promised Vietnamese elections in 1956. He supported the Batista regime in Cuba, until Castro overthrew it, and then attempted to overthrow Castro. Eisenhower drove Castro into the Soviet orbit, setting the stage for later the Bay of Pigs and missile crisis.
Kennedy lied to Congress and to the American people about intending to invade Cuba, then sent the exiles to their fate on the beaches of south Cuba. The exiles in Florida have ever since traded on what they, with some justice, feel was an American betrayal. (Our government has similarly betrayed many other people by encouraging their uprisings and then letting them die unaided: Hungarians, Marsh people, Kurds, et al.)
For all of the leadership skills that Schlessinger thought came to fruition in Kennedy's missile crisis, they accomplished nothing but the partial undoing of the harm that Kennedy himself did in precipitating the crisis.
He was just one more very bad president of the United States, a list that would grow with each subsequent presidency. We, Americans, are the most badly governed people in the First World, and we may deserve it.
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Hybrids and drivers are complicated
[Read the article: Who needs a Prius anyway?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The internal combustion engine is complicated enough without adding several systems to it: charger, motor, controller, and more.
Capping horsepower on personal vehicles would make designs for economy simpler and would save thousands of lives each year.
Drivers in my locality have no notion of fuel economy or brake wear. They drive accelerator, brake. They speed up to a red light, then brake at the last moment.
This is especially true of young drivers, but it is also true of the majority of others I observe.
I always get a laugh from another driver's passing me in order to brake for the red light clearly visible at the intersection. Do they think the light will go green if they approach it fast enough?
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Vote for president? A waste of time!
[Read the article: Stop lying to yourself. You love Dennis Kucinich]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We have the most undemocratic system in the western world (plus Japan, S.Korea and India) of electing our national leader. Anyone voter who participates in it does not place a high value on his time and misses the opportunity to show his contempt for our 18th century relic of a constitution with its electoral college and fear of the mob.
Look at the mob we have got in the White House and the Congress - Democrat and Republican! Could they be more corrupt if they had elected themselves? I don't think so. Our Constitution, the distortion of the 1st amendment to allow money to choose our government, the electoral college, the feckless separation of powers, the whole Montesquieu-package, OK for 1789, is now not worth the sweat of going to vote. Save energy! Stay home!
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Relatively few Americans have yet suffered from Iraq folly
[Read the article: Iraq taught us nothing]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Widely admitted is that relatively few Americans have yet suffered from the Iraq folly. No draft, no rise in taxes, no pictures of bodies arriving in plastic bags! But wait! A reckoning is yet to come. A country does not spend itself into bankruptcy, save for the kindness of China in loaning our government the money to operate, without consequences.
Accelerating the unraveling of the America we now know is the sub-prime mortgage crisis. It has a different cause, but in a way the same: irresponsibility in the private sector to match our government's irresponsibility in the public sector. The dollar continues to fall from both causes, and the inflation that comes from the higher costs of imports, including energy, will bite us hard.
While all this has been happening, our infrastructure continues to deteriorate, and our human capital is going down with it as schools fail in their missions, medical care fails to reach tens of millions of us, and the need for combatting global warming intensifies. To make matters worse, we have a political system based on a separation of powers constitution that belongs in the 18th century and is almost impossible to amend.
I thought the 20th century was bad. The 21st will make the 20th look like a picnic!
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Another defect of the US Constitution?
[Read the article: Giuliani on Kerik: Don't ask me]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In my untutored view, unless two unnecessary wars spaced 30 years apart are considered a GED in constitutional law, the 18th century US Constitution has many defects, large and small.
A large defect is the Montesquieu framework of separation of powers. That was conceived in a time and place when party politics was largely unknown (and unmentioned in our basic law). That party loyalty could exceed institutional and patriotic loyalty was undreamed of.
A smaller one is exemplified in the unlimited power of the president to pardon, which to my understanding can only be limited by amendment, an almost impossible process in all but the most emotionally driven issues: alcohol, women's right to vote, abolition of slavery (took a bloody war!), etc.
No president ought to have the power to pardon any official of a previous administration or any official whom he had previously appointed to or been appointed by a governmental position, federal, state or local, without the concurrence of congress.
There may be a better drafted limitation of this much abused presidential power, but something just begs to be done.