Letters to the Editor
Rob H.
Published Letters: 123 Editor's Choice: 30
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Clueless? Hapless?
[Read the article: The only way out]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Clueless? Hapless? If I hadn't read this piece, and someone had told me that Joe Conason wrote those words about a particular party's plan for Iraq, I would have believed he was writing about the Bush administration and most Republicans.
But I would have been mistaken. He's writing about the Democrats. All of them. It seems Conason has now jumped on that bandwagon which throws blanket condemnations over the entire Democratic Party for their varying positions on Iraq. And this is just plain sad.
As I wrote yesterday in another letter, it's really quite disturbing to see every Democrat lumped together. Democrats have offered differing plans. Murtha, Feingold, Kerry, and even Lieberman. Whether you agree with them or not is up to you. It's called Democracy.
And I'll give Conason the benefit of the doubt by saying that his blanket condemnation is his opinion. I just don't like the way it's delivered. I think it's unfair to legislators like Murtha, Kerry and Feingold to call them hapless and clueless. I mean he sounds a bit like Representative Jean Schmidt there.
But reading this piece, one might make the argument that Conason's position here opens him to the same charges. He accuses Democrats of refusing "to acknowledge that we are in a bind." Excuse me? It was my understanding that the competing plans for getting out of Iraq being offered by many Dems are based on just that assumption. Does he truly believe that Representative John Murtha doesn't recognize that Iraq has become a quagmire and that we're in a bind there? Does he think that Russ Feingold and John Kerry somehow missed those salient points as well?
As for maintaining troop levels and training the Iraqi army, all three legislators have implicitly and explicitly discussed these issues as they are the unavoidable by-product of any discussion of the war. Conason talks about them as if they are suddenly new revelations.
Most bewildering is Conason's plan. It's described in forty words and has been offered by some Iraqis whom Conason doesn't even identify. Bring the Sunni insurgents to the bargaining table? Not even the "brave Murtha" is willing to touch that one?
Maybe they would touch that one if Conason offered up more than forty measly words on the subject. And maybe there is something there. But how would the reader know when there are absolutely zero details. Who are the Iraqis? What would the plan entail considering that the Shiites have been getting blown away for the past two years and might not exactly stick to an agreement despite what we or any Iraqis negotiate. Give us some substance, Joe!
I love Joe Conason's writing. He is a tough and fair critic and I love reading his column. I just think that here, he's being far too simplistic and a bit disingenuous in his arguments. I expect more out of him and I'm asking him, for his next column, instead of launching tired broadsides at the Democrats, offer them your plan. But put some meat on the bones when you do it. Maybe that will wake up many of those who truly deserve to be called hapless and clueless.
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Heather, Heather, Heather...
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Poor Cindy (and I mean that).
It's one thing to hammer this Survivor contestant for not giving away four cars, but to lump her in with Kim Jong-il as an example of depravity in the world is pretty ridiculous, even by the standards of reality TV reporting.
Cindy is a zookeeper and animal trainer. Kim Jong-il is a psychotic mass-murderer who lets his people starve to death by the millions.
Cindy didn't give away four cars away. Only four people own cars in North Korea.
Cindy makes a bad political move and four people don't have a nice set of wheels and she doesn't get as many talk show appearances. Kim-Jong-il makes a bad political move and some psychopath might be walking around with a nuclear weapon.
Cindy, for the most part, eats crap for thirty-five days on a TV show. North Koreans, for the most part, eat crap their entire lives and then starve to death.
Do you see where I'm going with this?
Cindy Hall simply made a decision to keep a car. It was actually kind of refreshing. She didn't think about future talk-show appearances. She didn't think about politics and how it would look. The car giveaway, in effect, was simply a bloated example of Monty Hall-style shenanigans. And Cindy didn't bite. And really, if she didn't take the car, there was no guarantee that she would walk away with a million. Just as in Let's Make A Deal, she was put on the spot and asked to make a quick decision. She took the safe route and kept the bird in hand. Big whup.
Now was it a bad move? Maybe. But on the scale of the Kim Jong-ils of the world, it doesn't rate at all. Had Cindy been asked to decide the fate of four North Koreans rather than four cars, someone might have a point in linking the dictator and the reality TV contestant. But until the day reality television sinks to that level, it's pretty unfair to send Cindy Hall to those depths.