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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
crossmankl
Published Letters: 9
Bill - I have a very volatile throat cold right now and I almost succumbed during the laughing fit I had while reading this article. Fabulously funny. Keep them coming.
Absolutely brilliant. What an incisive dissection of the fat, fatuous society that was once the envy of the world. Thank you Peter. My God that was a pleasure to read. And let no person suppose that this vacuousness is limited to the feeble-minded or the uneducated or the immature. Au contraire. All around me there are people with degrees surfing this tide of anti-intellectualism and superstitious claptrap. How is it possible to come out the other side of 16 years of schooling and still have no inkling of how to recognise bullshit when you hear it? We are in deep trouble.
Glenn, I just wanted to thank you for your amazing reporting and commentary. Your column has become unmissable in my daily reading. There are so many aspects of your writing and thinking that are worthy of respect. You know where the greatest abuses are happening (White House, the mainstream media, etc)and you focus your spotlight on them relentlessly. I am profoundly grateful for what you are doing.
This is what I wrote to my friends:
Hi everyone
We are like parents who gave birth to a son and brought him up with great care and love and a superb education only to find that at the age of 15 he has become an uncontrollable monster. In the first place we need to diagnose what is wrong with him. Is it a psychological problem? Is it a physical problem? What is it that has caused this person, with all the advantages of his upbringing and with all the promise that that entails, to morph into a monster seemingly impervious to our cries of alarm and pain? This is what the American political system has become. All the carefully constructed checks and balances, all the brilliant minds that argued and gave birth to a constitution and political system that was understandably admired by all the world has become a grotesque and overfed mutant that has caused the deaths of 1 million Iraqis since 2003 and wants to do the same to Iran, has a congress that has in the last few years, in a bipartisan way, thrown out the 800 year old right of habeus corpus and embraced the most hideous forms of torture. This is not just an anomaly resulting from the presidency of GW. This is a system in which politicians with real integrity and moral principles(such as Kucinich) can never raise enough corporate donations to get near power. What can we do? Well first of all we need to diagnose what is wrong and then do what we can to treat the problems we find. It doesn't take too much to realize that one of the most broken parts of the system is the gathering and dissemination of news. Luckily, the internet has enabled (until Democrats fold on net neutrality) a form of news gathering and dissemination that recaptures the original dynamism and honesty of the very first pamphleteers: blogging. Glenn Greenwald is a superb example of a blogger. (He now writes for Salon). I value what he writes (almost daily) more than the combined output of the rest of the mainstream media. It suddenly strikes me that when it comes to news, no amount of quantity can compete with a single voice that speaks with dependable honesty and morality.
Glenn asks for donations twice a year. He explains it all here . Give what you can and try to pass this on to like minded friends.
Thanks
Ken
I just read Kovie's comment and Jesus does he hit the nail on the head. A powerful and elegant argument.
...is that anyone seriously wanting to know the truth of what is going on still reads the NYT or the WSJ in any form whatsoever. (Other than to compare their misrepresentation of the facts with more reliable sources). Weird really, that a man who writes for Salon, where Glenn Greenwald, who has shown convincingly time and again that such mainstream media is still utterly unwilling or incapable of reliably and consistently telling the truth, writes daily. He is not the only one. The case against the MSM is beyond dispute. To be fair on Farhad, it took me 40 years to understand that. Perhaps he is still a little young.
Thanks Glenn for another fearless article. In case there are occasions when you doubt whether you are getting through to people and whether it is worth the effort, may I say that for me your work is indispensible. I live in Boulder, a part of the country in which many people have adopted the belief that taking a stand on any point of principle or ethic is coarse and spiritually immature. Keep at it Glenn. You speak for me.
Thanks. That was one smoking little scene.
Much of the initial coverage about Fort Hood turned out to be wrong. Is there anything wrong with that?
The accountability imposed by another country for the CIA's kidnapping and torture reveals much about our own.
Fox News' morning show plays to type, talking about whether Muslims in the Army should face "special debriefings"
The survivor and author is upset about comparisons some on the right are making to genocide
Once seen as a lunatic fringe, reactionary anti-women groups are courting respectability
Salon headlines in your mailbox
