Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1986 Editor's Choice: 19
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So now it's the Democrats fault for not stopping the war in 2002?
[Read the article: Escalate first, ask questions later]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Sorry, but the Administration told everybody that they had credible evidence that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and had made plans to give them to Al Qaeda for use in attacking the U.S. on U.S. soil.
In fact, once the criticism started over the fact that Saddam Hussein did not have such weapons (a fact available from CIA reports in 1998 after Desert Fox, and from Hans Blix, and from Mohammed El Baradei before the war started) do you remember the first rebuttal to that criticism? The Bush people said they hadn't invaded because of the weapons of mass destruction but because Saddam Hussein had violated resolution 1442, to wit, he lied to them because he released CD's of his weapons inventory that had no weapons of mass destruction listed.
We're not supposed to criticize the Bush Administration, we're not under any circumstances supposed to say that they lied (supposedly what Clinton was impeached for), but the Democrats were supposed to know it was a lie and vote appropriately, otherwise the whole mess is their fault?
Such crap!
You sound like Former Vice-President Richard M. Nixon in 1967, "Opposition to the war in this country is the greatest single enemy working against the U.S.". Then he got in office (on a peace plan to end the war in 100 days), expanded the war, fought verbally, and at times violently with the opposition, and expanded the war into Cambodia, precipitating a genocide of between 1.5 and 2 million people. Lost it anyway. 2 million Cambodians, 1.5 million Vietnamese, 58,000 Americans. Thats a lot of blood spilled because somebody thinks that critics should shut up and support bad wars.
Sorry if so many of us don't understand why we're doing this again, and don't want to do it again. So we'll ignore your complaining if critics won't shut up. They're trying to save the lives you'd squander to prove the same point that couldn't be proved the last time.
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Too bad?, would that it were so
[Read the article: State of indifference]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Too bad the people close to Cheney didn't speak up about his true nature, isn't it? A cunning idiot for president, guided by one of the most dangerous crackpots American politics has ever produced."
George W. Bush ran for governor slamming his opponent, Ann Richards, for being a recovered alcoholic.
Dick Cheney and Bob Michel were a pair of the most mean spirited, nasty people around when they ran the Republican minority in the House.
We knew.
Somehow, the majority of this country decided that the best candidate for president would be the "person you'd most like to have a beer with", even though the man had given up alcohol because he couldn't handle it, instead of a man who knew facts and had started funding for the internet, because people who know something are too "wooden", and its ridiculous that anyone in Congress would have had anything to do with funding the internet.
Somehow, a press that badgered Eagleton and Tsongas out of the race investigating their health on grounds that it was important to know about people a heartbeat from the presidency, thought it would be okay not to talk about a guy who was a vice-presidency away from a heartbeat.
Somehow, being a crackpot or a cunning idiot wasn't as bad as giving a war whoop to ones supporters, or having a wife who was a busy medical doctor when the reporters wanted a pretty face. Somehow it doesn't matter that we are going to repeat the whole sorry load in 2008, because of a permanent co-dependency on horse race reporting, fake scandals and hot button issues. Somehow when you need a deep thinking complex mind the most, you get advertisements tattooed on eggs, so we have trouble keeping the government of the people, by the people and for the people from slowly perishing from this earth.
"And I'm always getting busted, so I have to take a stand. I believe that revolution, must be mighty close at hand."
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What about the status of widows?
[Read the article: Prostitution or a "humanitarian" solution?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I haven't seen anyone comment about the status of widows in all the debate about muta'a. This happens in wartime in societies that have no status for widows. That would be practically everywhere from Iraq, where this is now happening, down to India, and including some areas further south and east.
In many places, a widow is simply an outcast. How outcast? In India, a widow may have trouble getting an apartment on her own, people will refuse to rent to her. They have trouble surviving there and elsewhere if they have no children to support them, they frequently sort of indenture themselves to their children, becoming like live-in servants that move from household to household, even in well-off families.
And that is in a society where the widows are grandmother aged. Iraq has lost a lot of people over the last several years, many of them young men. Many of these men were married, many had children. Many of their widows see themselves as far too young to enshroud themselves and live on the sidelines of society for the rest of their lives. Many have no means of support. It won't come from a job training program, there's a 60 percent unemployment rate in Iraq.
Does it look like putting rules to prostitution? Yes. Was it invented to allow widows who turned to prostitution during wars some way to get to heaven? Perhaps. Would you rather prostitution with no rules? How do you want them to survive? More gets hurt in a war than soldiers.