Letters to the Editor
Greg in FL
Published Letters: 66 Editor's Choice: 17
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So the White House is in control...
[Read the article: What Democrats need to learn about power]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]because of its huge megaphone, and single message. Clinton won on the budget battle in 1995, Bush won on war funding in 2007. That's your message as I understand it.
So how exactly is it then that the Democrats "surrendered" when in fact they (by your thesis) had no chance to succeed at the outset? In truth, it would take an unusual confluence of unlikely factors for any Congress to get a bill past a President determined to dig in and fight, provided there is a base of support enough to credibly block a veto override. That doesn't mean that anger towards Democrats who caved is inappropriate, because the consequences of this war continuing are measured in bodies of young people, not just programs or dollars.
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One aspect of Nixon's legacy
[Read the article: Nixon knows best]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ok, everybody knows that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld were incubated in the Nixon White House. But also, if you remember the Saturday Night Massacre, you remember that Solicitor General Robert Bork finally fired prosecutor Archibald Cox. Then when Bork was nominated for a Supreme Court vacancy by Ronald Reagan, he was defeated along party lines, much of the animosity owing to the firing ordered by Nixon thirteen years earlier. The Bork defeat prompted a backlash among conservatives that lingers to this day. The obstruction of Clinton appointees to the Federal bench followed by the rush of confirmations under Dubya means that the Justice system is, for the rest of many readers' lifetimes, heavily skewed rightward. All traceable to Nixon.
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An awakening experience
[Read the article: More gloom for GM and Ford, more joy for Toyota]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Last week I parked between two Priuses. A year ago it was remarkable to even see a Prius on the road anywhere down here in Florida. Say what you will about absolute numbers of vehicles produced; which star would you like to hitch a ride with: GM or TM? When it comes to putting your dollars on the line, Wall Street values TM (Toyota) at over ten times the capitalization of GM.
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The cartoon "'60's" people refer to didn't exist...
[Read the article: "The Trap"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Arguably, life's risks have intensified for everyone in America these past few decades, and for young people of course this is dispiriting. Young people are keenly observant, and because they have so much future to ponder, our trend of increasingly privatizing risk - be it downsizing, lack of health coverage, our "winner take all" culture - naturally is frightening. To not be anxious in the face of the future we seem to be facing would be insane.
As has been brought up by many writers in this thread, The Trap has always existed. This characature many people have of the '60's is way off the mark. Most '60's kids (including me) were fully indoctrinated with the money-equals-success ethic. A huge majority of young males dutifully submitted to the draft, even after Vietnam became scary and unpopular, because Grandpa served in WWI and Dad served in WWII, and by golly, it was our duty. While indeed some universities then had free tuition, remember that the overwhelming fraction of kids went to work at the (then-good-paying and seemingly secure) factory right out of high school. Most of us got high from beer, not pot, and it looks to me that this is still true today.
The Trap is the symptom. The cause is insecurity. We are afraid if we take too many days off, we'll be summarily fired and thereby lose medical care. So we work even if we are sick. To say that people should step back and change their choices in life is kind of like trying to describe the Universe from "outside" - you can't do it, we're all in The Trap.
In John Lennon's verses in "Imagine", he says that imagining no God is easy, imagining no Country is not implied difficult, but when he gets to "Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can", he's saying human nature is fundamentally connected to ownership in a much deeper way.
So is it possible to get out of The Trap? Perhaps not, though of course we can make our society more gentle and graceful in many many ways. As some commenters have mentioned, maybe it'll unfortunately take another Great Depression before we can get a new New Deal.
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Ipana!
[Read the article: His stethoscope is loaded]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I remember Ipana! Didn't it die out in the Jurassic sometime? With Bucky Beaver? I love reading coded messages (no one under about 40 need apply!)
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But really, what about Greenwald's criticisms?
[Read the article: The MSM vs. the blogosphere]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What I didn't see in this piece is whether Scherer really sees the biases that Greenwald is continually exposing. It's one thing to say, as in this piece, "Yeah, I need to reevaluate my work", and quite another to say "Yeah, the coziness, the clubbiness, the time pressures, the fear of losing sources, all that has not only made for bad reporting, but has made for slanted reporting, favoring the status quo, the Washington insider interests, the interests of editors and bosses, and thereby resulting in helping the worst Administration in American history build and maintain power, and hindering accountability by refusing to be critical, questioning, and skeptical even when the Administration's long history of dissembling and politicization of institutions was well known and would obviously call for skepticism".
If you interpret Greenwald's criticisms as just "media reporting", i.e. insider baseball in the journalism profession, you're missing the point severely. As he has stated often, and especially in his book How Would A Patriot Act?, Greenwald is intensely concerned about the subversion of the Constitution of the United States, and the terrible consequences that will surely follow. He is metaphorically looking at a burning building, and yelling as frantically as he can to make his blinder-wearing colleagues turn around and see the disaster unfolding right in plain sight.
In this article, I don't sense that Michael Scherer sees this disaster at all.