Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 113 Editor's Choice: 3
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Fine central point -- how our prejudices immediately label realities
[Read the article: Instant prejudice: Korea and Virginia Tech]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Me too -- I immediately assumed is was a rednck with a rifle -- someone like Charlie Whitman of the Texas Tower, or Timothy.
And it turned out to be an exchange student with two handguns who lost it.
Tasteless observation here -- how many impoverished (and often Southern) would-be students are so determined to get an education they're willing to go to Iraq and risk being shot to earn money for college. Where they can go to classes and risk being shot.
(Well, I already said it was tasteless. But not as tasteless as President "Let's Go To War" trying to prop up his ratings on the backs of those shocked, traumatized students.)
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Cognitive dissonance
[Read the article: Is it OK to criticize the president again?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Aside from the fact that most of the students/faculty involved were White or Asian, and he didn't have to get icky old mud all over his Slunk Skin cowboy boots, there was this moment on CNN as various people were tearing their clothing and nearly shrieking "How could something like this happen?" while on the bottom of the screen, the news-crawl was telling us that American and Allied forces had just killed several dozen humans in Afghanistan to crush Taliban presence in one province.
As to Bush's warm and human side, a British journalist once wrote a book called "Nixon's Head" and related accompanying Nixon on an Eastern European tour, and at one point Nixon gave a post-holocaust speech that reduced everyone -- including press -- to tears. And as they walked away and this man wondered if he'd misjudged Nixon, Tricky Dick elbowed him in the ribs and said, "Hey how about that? Really had 'em going, didn't I, kiddo?" Bush has had 6 years to get his sincerity act down, but still was taking someone else's tragedy and turning it into a photo op. He gets no high marks from me for presenting us with a relatively successful impersonation of a human being.
I recommend reading "Journal of Albion Moonlight" by Kenneth Patchen, a WWII novel about a man who, tormented by the killing going on in the world and invading his mind, decided that doing some of his own killing would be the only way to exorcize those demons. Not saying this was the case, just that, even other than the supposed plot, it is an amazingly brilliant book by a brilliant writer.
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Like the JFK-Nixon debate -- it depended on whether one was watching or listening
[Read the article: And the winner is?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was working and recording it in my office, so I listened to the whole thing, but didn't watch the candidates except for an occasional turn to see what/who.
Without seeing his excellent political poster face, Barack Obama sounded shallow, callow, and a man with much intelligence but no gravitas.
Hillary's voice will undo her -- unalloyed by practiced facial expressions, it was as grating and annoying as fingernails on blackboard... I came close to expecting her to say "And your little dog too" -- despite her claims/headlines today that her "southern accent" will stand her in good stead. She SOUNDS harsh and cold and emotionless... makes Dukakis sound like Dr Phil...
Mike Gravel is the white version of 2004's Rev Sharpton -- the one with no hope to win, but who hangs in and says the things you might want to hear but that none of the others would dare to say, even if they thought them. Coming from an important and refreshing, if sometimes irrelevant (to the issue at hand) point of view. Overdone, but that's because -- perhaps -- he needed to be introduced and to introduce himself.
He calls things by their rightful name -- i.e., soldiers died in vain, war was lost from the day we went in -- and as was observed by John Wilmot, Second Earl of Rochester, a brilliant but much MUCH more vile man than even as portrayed by Johnny Depp in "Libertine" --- "Any man who calls things by their rightful name will surely be hanged."
Gravel's barbs were quite welcome to me, since all the others were taking themselves WAAAY too seriously --- gravitas, guys, not self-pomp.
For starters, even Mick Jagger wouldn't expect anyone to care if the Stones did an 18 month long tour... we will come to despise these people before too long. I predict John Edwards may well be the big winner when the big Tuesdays come around.
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Absolutely correct with one exception...
[Read the article: George Tenet on the staircase with the neocons]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"L'esprit d'escalier" aren't the "what I chould have said's" you think at home on your way up to the bedroom... they're the ones you think on the (back) stairs as you're LEAVING the party.
Other than that, you have correctly pointed to the fact that "the system" didn't fail, as such, but that the one man who could have and should have stood up for the truth decided to wooze and waffle.
Putting his book in the genre of such works of disingenuous B.S. such as MacNamara's "Not My Fault -- No One Told Me" defense which just conveniently forgot that anyone who tried to tell him -- and there were a few -- was followed by MacNamara expelling them from the room, or MacNamara himself leaving the meeting (as an attendee reported happened when someone tried to point out that the armament in question was NOT Russian but American). This information from a colonel, a Professor of Military History at West Point who reviewed MacNamara's book when it came out, and disputed the so-called facts because he mentioned that, at the time, he had been on DOD staff and present IN those meetings.
It's always so much easier to go along when you're being paid (in money and/or status, privilege, or whatever) to ignore contradictory facts.
They're such rough tough guys except when the truth comes out.
Then they run and hide in diffusive verbiage like cockroaches scurrying for the corners when the lights go on in the kitchen.
Vermin, all of them, murderous vermin.