Letters to the Editor

• I kind of demur...

  [Read the article: Hillary Clinton, the first Latina in chief?]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  ...Richard hasn't quite put his finger on what's happening with black/brown relations. It's not solely dominated by, say, Mexican/S.American/C.American hispanics the interplay between Puerto Ricans and blacks, Dominicans and blacks and, say, Cuban-Americans and blacks figure in the mix, as well.

  There are variations on the level of cooperation and competition depending upon the circumstances and/or the group: blacks and puerto ricans, in nyc, for instance, (even, here, you could contrast this with the interplay between blacks and Dominicans--a situation perhaps influenced by what happened on the island of Hispaniola between 1822 and 1844) have closer social and political relationships than, say, Cubans and African-Americans in Miami (although, this, too, is affected by circumstance since a younger generation of blacks and Cubans show more of an inclination to work together). And, as another letter writer observes, it isn't as if there haven't been examples of black-hispanic cooperation in Los-Angeles, the supposed epi-center of black/hispanic social and political hand-to-hand contact.

  While there is an inevitable germ of truth about cooperation between competing minorities, the media and/or the Clinton campaign have probably intensified the perception of that competition [I hesitate here, if only to acknowledge my uneasiness about our tendency to always cudgel the media for merely being a messenger of bad tidings] and, if it is the Clinton campaign's doing shame on it for, as Frank Rich put it in his column, today, risking ratcheting up possible black/brown tensions and trashing 30 years of an arguably mutual beneficent relationship between Dems and blacks [a non-sensical move, anyway, since Clinton was virtually even with Barama re the African-American vote, prior to Bill's misadventure and the campaign's slyly implicit injection of race and even after Barama had gotten the wind in his sails regarding his perceived presidential viability].

  Permalink Sunday, February 10, 2008 07:39 AM

• Uh,uh, NCawley...

  [Read the article: The Shuster fallout]
  [Read more letters about this article: Here]

  ...I'm not buyin' that one:

  "...Lets go back in time when all americans were informed by Colin Powell that there were Weapons of Mass Destruction. We all believed him...he had the pictures of trucks that were supposedly carrying them, he had maps of where they were and he had pictures of the warehouses they were being stored in. How do you think the people in the Senate reacted to these pictures? Have you ever asked? Why did Colin Powell go to the United Nations with these pictures? Did you ever ask that question? WE WERE ALL LIED TO!..."

  Some people have good sense, morality and the ability to do their homework when recognising what obviously shapes up as the "most important vote" in their poltical lives:

  Daniel Akaka (D-HI)

  Jeff Bingaman (D-NM)

  Barbara Boxer (D-CA)

  Robert Byrd (D-WV)

  Lincoln Chafee (R-RI)

  Kent Conrad (D-ND)

  Jon Corzine (D-NJ)

  Mark Dayton (D-MN)

  Richard Durbin (D-IL)

  Russell Feingold (D-WI)

  Robert Graham (D-FL)

  Daniel Inouye (D-HI)

  James Jeffords (I-VT)

  Edward Kennedy (D-MA)

  Patrick Leahy (D-VT)

  Carl Levin (D-MI)

  Barbara Mikulski (D-MD)

  Patty Murray (D-WA)

  Jack Reed (D-RI)

  Paul Sarbanes (D-MD)

  Debbie Stabenow (D-MI)

  Paul Wellstone (D-MN)

  Ron Wyden (D-OR)

  [immediate source: Robert Geiger's blog at http://www.democrats.com/node/6890]

  I was so taken aback by the nascent assertions, in 2002, that we should go to war with Iraq rather than continue our pursuit of Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban that I did research merely by exercising my mouse hand and clicking finger...those assertions just didn't add up to the point where we should risk strategic viability, the national treasury, the lives of our soldiers and those of Iraqis who'd already had had their and their childrens' butt waxed by an embargo just to axe a contained dictator who'd rarely roused himself to do anything but shoot at high flying US planes maintaining a no-fly zone that, by the way, enabled Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the one significant al-quaeda terrorist actually in Iraq prior to 9/11, to frolic free in the northlands of our Kurdish "friends."

  David Shuster and the execrable Chris Matthews aside, the reaction you're noting in this letter column isn't about sexism, it's about a senator wanting to be President so badly she seemingly betrayed everything she says she allegedly believed in.

  Permalink Tuesday, February 12, 2008 04:15 AM