Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 543 Editor's Choice: 79
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Cruise Control
[Read the article: "Mission: Impossible III"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What an entertaining, subtle, funny, smart review essay about Cruise. You could argue that his dance and air guitar in "Risky Business" prefigured his whole acting career: cheeky exhibitionism rather than performance, self-involvement rather than interaction. But there's at least one exception--he did seem more present and focused in Jerry Maguire than ever before. I remember being startled and even pleased. Perhaps, though, it was just the shock (or thrill) of doing a scene with Cuba Gooding in the nude that woke him up. "Show me the...."
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The hardcore 1/3
[Read the article: The Fool and the Knave]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As Bush's poll ratings sink, you wonder about the 1/3 who still admire and approve. Bojangles is a perfect dismal representative. Despite the umpteen articles and reports across a range of media proving that Valerie Plame was not only undercover (and now we know was working on assessing/surveilling Iran's WMD program), Bojangles still croaks out the lame wingnut line: "She wasn't really undercover." It's utterly childish and very sad. These people have been hypnotized and nothing--certainly not the truth--will ever shake them out of their trance. For them, facts don't matter, facts will never matter. It's like that line from the Talking Heads song: "Facts don't do what I want them to." Indeed, facts drive them back to pettish childhood foot-stomping: "She was not! She was not! She was not! You're a traitor!"
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Depressing
[Read the article: Lapdogs]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It's of course worse than we realized at the time. At my house, the run-up to the war was the last nail in the coffin for the news programs of all kinds, and it made us sick of the quisling Washington Post and the NYT. We dropped the weekly WaPo and went to just the Sunday NYT--it was too painful having Izvestia and Pravda come into our homes so regularly. But I'm not convinced that anyone in the MSM has learned a lesson about Iraq because the coverage of Iran makes it sound like the same bogus "imminent threat." I'm convinced we will, with the help of the MSM, be bombing Iran before the election. How much MSM coverage is Rep. Peter DeFazio getting in his attempt to reign in the President on Iran? Close to none.
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Shame
[Read the article: Colbert: Not just a flop, but "rude" and "a bully" too]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Cohen, like his lax and lackluster DC brethren, was profoundly humiliated by Stephen Colbert. He hit them where it hurts--their pride. So of course they're responding with contempt; it's the typical strategy for attempting to rise above shame (read Gershen Kaufman or Silvan Topmkins on shame dynamics). That's why they've said he's "not funny"--it's as damning a judgment you can make of acomedian. But he was funny, screamingly, shockingly devastatingly funny.
Almost as funny as accusing Colbert of being a bully. Talk about projection! How can anyone bully the commander-in-chief?
Justin Cohen in Bush on the Couch, one of the few serious assessments of the President's alcoholism, says that in some ways the media is afraid of Bush, that its co-dependent (as is the country), and that the media is unwilling to probe too hard because they're terrified of what might happen if his anger is unleashed. That would explain the weird ways in which the press has for the most part handled him with kid gloves, ditto far too many Democrats.
I'm glad Cohen has so little insight into his own psychology--it helps generate more interest in the Colbert performance and gives us more evidence of MSM bankruptcy.
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Inquiring Minds Want to Know
[Read the article: A question for Rumsfeld: "Why did you lie?"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are we sure that was really Rumsfeld?
Maybe he took a page from the President's boffo, critically acclaimed, MSM-blessed performance
at the Correspondents' Dinner and offered up a Rumsfeld impersonator or even a mechanical stand-in. That could explain why his batteries seemed to go dead for a moment. In fact, given how robotic Condi always seems, maybe the two of them are automatons, and so sending them to Iraq wasn't much of a risk.
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What crap!
[Read the article: How Opal Mehta saved our lives]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If she had a photographic memory that made her remember dozens of passages from two different authors' books, then why didn't the passages appear in identical form? If she truly had such a memory, then she was consciously plagiarizing, remembering and then changing the passages so they seemed different enough.
I taught freshmen for many years, and don't you believe they don't know plagiarism is a serious offense, despite what some letter writers here think. And as an author who has had his work plagiarized, I have no sympathy for this young woman, who will probably cry her heart out on Oprah, get another huge contract, this time for a memoir, and end up starring as herself in a sitcom.
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Missing Pieces
[Read the article: Should I tell his wife he's gay?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]There's something missing here in the letter and the response. I think the writer is still angry at John for dropping him and there's some element of revenge in his even contemplating sharing information that could destroy John's marriage after several years of not being in each other's lives.
I think the writer isn't being completely honest with himself as to his motives and I also think it's none of his damned business. He has no idea what the reality of John's marriage is like as it's being lived, and no idea what his interference might do.
And the advice that's been offered to him sounds like some half-baked tough love message from an afternoon talk show guest shrink: facile, smarmy, and grossly wrongheaded.
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Chris Mathews shows his colors
[Read the article: It's like Chris Matthews said: Only the "real whack jobs" dislike Bush]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Every now and then I tune in for a few minutes at a time to Chris Mathews, solely out of morbid curiosity. Could he really have become such a pompous, nattering ideologue? Last night, in response to Ed Rollins talking about how hard it would be, if not impossible, for Bush to recover from his slump in the polls, the camera mistakenly cut to Mathews, who was despairingly shaking his head, his mouth slack with sorrow. In the same segment, he claimed that "Democrats haven't done jack!" in the last five years, and when Bill Clinton was mentioned as a good rep for the Democratic Part, Mathews kept repeating "Monica Lewinsky" like a cartoon parrot squawking "Pieces of eight, pieces of eight." It was pathetic and revolting.