Letters to the Editor
Chase
Published Letters: 7
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The problem with impeachment...
[Read the article: Bush's impeachable offense]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The problem with impeaching President Bush is that then Cheney becomes President. He's even worse than Bush on every issue the left hates about Bush and is even more in favor of the impeachable offenses Bush is accused of than Bush is. Unless we can impeach them both at the same time, I don't see the value of impeaching Bush.
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The terrorists have won
[Read the article: Getting beyond our airport security obsession]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Seriously, if I can't bring my toiletries on the plane with me, I'm not going to fly and the terrorists have won.
Oplan Bojinka was foiled. This latest plot to blow up planes out of London was foiled. I don't understand why this scares people; it should make people feel safer. We're winning the actual war on terror in that fewer people have died from terrorist attacks than from bathtub drownings, but we are sadly losing the war on terror in that we are terrorizing ourselves and wasting enormous sums of time, effort, and money on a futile attempt to achieve perfect protection against a very clever, patient, determined, and suicidal enemy.
We could have used the money spent on the war in Iraq to give every Palestinian in the "occupied territories" $100,000 (and still had a lot left over) and it would have done a lot more for peace in the Middle East and squelching terrorism than banning toothpaste from airplanes ever will.
To defeat the terrorists all we have to do is stop being afraid. Unfortunately, people who are afraid are much more eager consumers of things that make them feel safer (whether that be politicians, wars, or duct tape) than people who feel secure, so don't be looking for the government or corporations to tell you the truth about how safe you really are. You have to figure it out for yourself.
Or Google "a false sense of insecurity".
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Can we all just get over it?
[Read the article: Right-wing blogs discover massive conspiracy to hide WMDs in Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Look, despite the millions of victims and survivors (and surviving perpetrators), there are still people who believe the Holocost never happened. So it's safe to assume there will always be people who believe virtually any proposition of historical fact, whether it be that Saddam had WMDs when (or just before) the US invaded or whether or not GW Bush (or the Israeli's) really blew up the World Trade Centers. Let's get over it. (The brilliance of conspiracy theories is that any evidence tending to disprove the theory is evidence of the conspiracy, lack of evidence is evidence of the conspiracy, so the theory is like an undead zombie, impossible to kill.)
The real fact of the matter is that regardless of the WMDs, the war is judged by whether or not we leave Iraq better than we found it, and suffer no more costs than the results were worth. In that light, the war is clearly a failure, regardless of whether there were no WMDs (as the inspectors suspected and GW Bush has admitted) or there were WMDs that are now in the hands of other enemies of the USA.
For more on the incredible number of major blunders of this whole war and strategy, see this article in the generally sober Financial Times of London:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/f1874316-de08-11db-afa7-000b5df10621.html
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Sorry to see it go
[Read the article: Goodbye to the Fix, for now]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm sorry to see The Fix go. It was the only thing keeping me up to date on celebrity gossip, because like Scott Lamb, I have better things to do that scour gossip columns for interesting tidbits.
Whether we like it or not, Celebrity Gossip is one of the things that bring us together as a nation, that work against the isolation caused by longer work weeks and endless distractions of techology and entertainment to give us all a sense of belonging to one big (severely disfunctional) family. We all know Sanjaya now; he's our crazy distant cousin by marriage....
So if you don't bring back The Fix as it was, please at least bring in a high quality digest from somewhere else, as you do with AP News.
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Military Whitewash Act of 2006
[Read the article: The CIA's latest "ghost detainee"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Mark Benjamin says:
The White House apparently lost when Congress overwhelmingly passed the Military Commissions Act of 2006. It forbids detainee abuse, using specific language that experts on human rights and international law say would be hard, if not impossible, to circumvent legally.
On the other hand, Amnesty International says:
Now Congress has passed the Military Commissions Act. Amnesty International will work for the repeal of this legislation which violates human rights principles.
Read the extensive list of problems at http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/ENGAMR511542006 which includes "Narrow[ing] the scope of the War Crimes Act by not expressly criminalizing acts that constitute "outrages upon personal dignity, particularly humiliating and degrading treatment" banned under Article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions."
I say:
The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was nothing more than an act of political theater, as was exposed in Salon at the time. I'm saddened and surprised that a Salon reporter would at this point characterize it as something so meaningful and substantial. It is not surprising in the least to find that it didn't change anything in the administration's behavior.