Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 1988 Editor's Choice: 19
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@Diane Powe -- Brilliant
[Read the article: What "truly motivates" George W. Bush?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If the President is not really an authoritarian who is motivated by seeing his every action as inherently for the good of the nation then he has the largest megaphone in the world to explain how he has been misunderstood. To date, that hasn't happened. Why that hasn't happened is unknowable, but it is certainly a rational response by those of us who think he is damaging our country to attack the underpinnings of what gives every appearance of being his sincerely held worldview.
Exactly.
But this group of people have espoused two views that make things very difficult to understand: 1) They have espoused the view that the end justifies the means, and, 2) They have espoused the view that all speech is political, and that therefore whether or not what one says is true is subservient to what effect one want's the words to have.
That being the case, there is only one thing that characterizes their "motivation" and that is their "end". Since it has not been expedient from their point of view to discuss this, we are left with only two credible measures to point to what that end might be: What their trajectory is, and whether or not they think they are making progress. If they think they are making progress, and we can understand the trajectory, we can assume that the endpoint of the trajectory is their "end" and therefore what "motivates" them. If they don't think they are making progress, then the only things from which we can deduce their desired trajectory are their corrective actions. Anything else is irrelevant since their words and actions are only "means" and therefore have no face value.
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About to explode.
[Read the article: "Fringe liberal bloggers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why did the Republicans gain so much power int he 80's and 90's to begin with? Democrats failed to disassociate themselves with the counter-culture movement and lost a lot of moderate "values voter" Americans.
Not so fast. Nixon took over in an election where the really down the fringe candidate, and a big winner, was murdered, and the centrist candidate, the Democratic Machine Guy, became the Democratic choice. He won again in an election in which he engineered that the Democrats' best and most outspoken candidate withdrew from the race (Edwin Muskie) and in which, totally contrary to the 2000 election, the press was all over the Democratic VP candidate's health history.
Reagan won after Carter got hit broadside at the convention by an intransigent Ted Kennedy, and then got his votes split by John Anderson.
Beginning with Reagan, and Mark Fowler, we changed our mental history to fit a news media that gave up reporting and went into corporate king making for a living.
Personally, I believe:
* Torture is wrong, any time, any where, any one, any ticking whatever.
* The corporations have been working on the takeover of this country since circa 1876 and it was only a matter of time until they made their power play.
* Being a democracy, every citizen of this country represents us as a public face when abroad, military or civilian, and has an obligation to the rest of us to be the American that earns respect.
* The Vietnam war was wrong, the Iraq war is wrong. They will still be wrong even if 53 of the 50 states vote for them.
* There are two types of large organisms on this planet for a reason, until there are two types of machines, there will be no balance in the atmosphere.
* There are 6 billion people in the world, 2 billion have no access to clean drinking water, 1 billion has no reliable access to drinking water at all. Without a lot of very radical thinking, much of the world will soon starve to death or kill each other trying not to.
* Everyone in this world is entitled to hear the reason for their detention, and have it judged valid by a duly constituted judiciary -- even bin Laden, even the most despicable possible person.
* A nation's respect for civil rights is judged by how it treats the worst of its citizens.
* The Holy Land is not my holy land, it's time to attend to the other 6 billion people on the planet.
* The word terrorist is undefinable.
I also believe, having done negotiations internationally, that politics is most decidedly not about compromise, it's about consensus. The solution to disagreements frequently comes from a new idea, not the convex sum of the old ones.
Can I be placed in the liberal fringe now? I'm not sure I can stand centrism anymore.
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@healthyskeptic
[Read the article: "Fringe liberal bloggers"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]During his presidency was when the counter culture movement really exploded, in part reaction against the Vietnam war, which then itself got out of control, and extended to anti-authoritarianism, drug culture, radicalism for radicalism sake, and all the other negatives of the hippy and CC movement.
May I ask how old you are? This is a total misrepresentation of the timeline of the 60's and 70's, it negates the prior existence of the counterculture, has a very weird phrase "extended to anti-authoritarianism" (is this "out of control"?), and basically shifts the history of the left and the history of the right with respect to each other, putting the history of the left later than it should be, the history of the right, earlier.
And it in no way negates my contention that the wrong people ended up running in '68 and '72, and had as much to do with the success of the right and the beginnings of the "Southern Strategy" as anything else. In particular, you seem ignorant that HHH could not have won any election regardless of where Nixon was on the spectrum, because opposition to the Vietnam war had already boiled over (it seems to occur later in your "history"), whereas Robert Kennedy might very well have won. You also seem to be neglecting that Reagan took less than 50% of the vote in 1980.
Don't be calling people revisionist or excusist (?) until you've verified that your own version of history is correct, which your's isn't.