Letters to the Editor
notre druide
Published Letters: 116 Editor's Choice: 5
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@ NewYorkLawyer
[Read the article: Punch-drunk Rudy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]McCain is the real problem for Democrats.
This California lawyer agrees, but only because Romney seems so obviously to be some kind of automaton. Has anyone actually seen him blink?
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The Three Stooges
[Read the article: Blowback from the GOP's holy war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]No one would speak of Christofascism or Judeofascism as the Republican candidates speak of Islamofascism.
Oh I beg to differ. Some of us speak of "Christianazis" and "Zionazis" all the time. George Bush is the former. Elliot Abrams is the latter. And we put them in the same bag with Osama Bin Laden.
Admittedly this is not an entirely sound use of the term "nazi" (or "fascist," for which it is a more euphonic stand-in). Fascism has a lot of different meanings; it had a lot of different meanings to Mussolini, who coined it, and who was never troubled much by a need for intellectual or linguistic consistency.
When we speak of "fascism" in this context we are referring to a particularly virulent and malignant modern form of tribalism. It stimulates and feeds on the xenophobia that's bred in the human bone. That trait was a useful one in the genetic competition of the savannah, but it will destroy our species, and quite a few others, if we don't get it under control.
It doesn't help that the elephant in the middle of this particular living room is rabid Zionism and the terroristic policies it has produced. I don't say there would be no Al Quaeda but for U.S. support of Israel in the ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The unholy alliance for oil between the west and the sheikhs would have ensured some level of unrest among the peoples thus deprived of what our own founding documents call "inalienable" rights. But without blind American support for Israel's most ill-conceived policies, Al Quaeda (and "Islamofascism") would be a pale shadow of what they have, and I fear will, become.
It's the same story as on the savannah, but now the tribes have traded rocks and sticks for bombs, germs, and poisons. Blaming all this on a single religion or its adherents is an error that is likely to prove fatal to us all.
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Wow
[Read the article: Mitt Romney's Mormon detour]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I can't for the life of me see what about this article touched so many nerves. Romney may be two days from elimination, he takes a detour from the campaign to attend the funeral of the patriarch of his weird church. That's not news? If one isn't interested, one can always move on to the next article. Why anyone would take the trouble to assert that the article shouldn't even exist is beyond me.
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A Simple Question for the Editor
[Read the article: John McCain is running for sissy in chief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]According to Wikipedia there are 172,000 new book titles published in the United States every year, not to mention 206,000 in the U.K. and probably another 25,000 in other English-speaking countries. Why in God's name would Salon choose to publicize a self-promoting clown whose agenda obviously begins and ends with selling as many copies as he can in hopes of landing a really fat contract next time?
I'd like to make Salon my cyberspace home, but every so often you run something so utterly meritless that it shakes my confidence in your editorial judgment.
And no, I did not read the whole piece. I've fallen into that trap too many times. Sometimes you don't need your nose rubbed in something to know what it is. The smell is unmistakable.
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@ Beragon
[Read the article: John McCain is running for sissy in chief]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree entirely about the neocon response to 9/11, but I would replace the word "sissies" with "cowards," a good old English word that perfectly describes the entire Bush government (now that Colin Powell has left) and also describes what they want us to be. As I have posted before, these guys are all heroes in their own minds because they don't balk at sending a few hundred thousand underprivileged American kids off to suffer and inflict grievous injuries and death so that the privileged elite can rake in unprecedented profits. At best it is what Roger Waters called "The Bravery of Being Out of Range." They're the worst kind of cowards precisely because they fancy that heroism is something you can partake of vicariously.
As for their attitude toward the Constitution, let's stop even entertaining their claim that they are the party of strict construction and original intent. Conservative judges were manufacturing constitutional doctrines to protect power and privilege before the Warren court or Roe v. Wade were even a blip on the horizon. In Bush's case we have the words right out of his own mouth: the Constitution is just "a goddamn piece of paper." (If this is news to anyone, see the link at my sig.)
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The Bogeyman Theme
[Read the article: The fun and excitement of civilization wars (fought from afar)]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It can't be a coincidence that the fall of the Soviet Union was followed almost immediately by the discovery that our way of life is threatened by "Islamofascism." The industrial-military complex discovered that the "lessons of World War Two" could be applied to create an atmosphere of perpetual enmity and constantly imminent military threat, so long as a suitably frightening enemy could be conjured up. On paper the newly nominated enemy hardly seemed frightening enough to fill the role, but vivid television images of collapsing towers could be used to obscure his essential impotence.
There is one real danger: that one of our many enemies may find a way to deploy a truly dangerous weapon in one of our population centers. If you were trying to minimize that danger, however, you could hardly have gone about it less effectively than the neocons have. Of course, that has never been their agenda. Indeed, the detonation of a suitcase nuke in San Francisco would make them happy on several levels.