Just walk away from it.

I evicted television from my house in 1981, and lived without one for years before even allowing one into my house, where it's since spent 99% of its time unused and unplugged.

I've never had a single regret about that. You'd be surprised at how superfluous it is.

I know that sports fans will miss sports- but every 5 minutes, there's a commercial... well, some of it is still good. You can keep a TV around and plug it in to watch games. Because that is what television does best.

As for the TV News- everyone needs to demonstrate their contempt in the most direct way possible, by turning it all off. I don't care if Fox reaps 100% of the ratings for the remaining news audience. That's as it should be. Circus News, for rubes and boobs.

Really, the rest of it is merely Fox Lite. Newsertainment formats. And plenty of commercials! Especially the hypochondria-inciting ones!

(How do I know that? There's a TV at the gym...the damn things are damn near ubiquitous. I was so glad when the one at the Post Office stopped functioning, because the Feds wouldn't buy it a cable converter. Now that's what I call thrift.)

Either this is a try for syndication with Salon, or one of your zombie acolytes with nothing to contribute themselves has put up one of your recent columns in an attempt to wallpaper over the rout of the pro-Afghan war cheerleaders on the previous pages of this letters thread.

Phil Weiss spent a lot of time in Arkansas, and he seems to feel he has legitimate grounds for his suspicions about Bill Clinton.

I'd like to hear him go into more extensive detail about his experiences there.

re: my previous reference to the investigations of Clinton's role at Mean by Roger Morris, here's a 2007 interview with him by Susan Mazur:

http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00058.htm

I think that both Weiss and Morris are competent journalists, good researchers, and people of integrity who have no personal or political axes to grind against the Clintons.

I don't get the idea that their efforts are attempts at personal self-aggrandizement or mendacity, either. Neither of them has exactly been catapaulted into the limelight as a result of their findings, both of which have extensive research files underpinning their conclusions.

And we all should know that when the American Mass Media wants to spotlight and make a folk hero out of someone with a threadbare resume trumpeting a sensationalistic revelation based on nothing more than insinuations based on rumors, it's a project that's easily accomplished.

In this degraded culture, television exposure is widely considered to be the most valid measure of a journalist's influence with the American public at large- unfortunately with some justification. But the TV Media will be interviewing Joe the Plumber again, before they touch Roger Morris.

It seems as if every time a Clinton partisan seeks to dismiss the cocaine smuggling activities connected to Mena and the Contra resupply effort, they bring up "The Clinton Chronicles"- that laughably spun piece of right-wing agitprop.

Then they say "nothing else to see here, folks, move on."

But they never mention the findings of people like Roger Morris and Sally Denton.

The last time I brought this up, I was beset by a duo of unoriginal table-pounders, barking at me and trying to silence me.

It's in my archive. Anyone who's sufficiently curious can find it, somewhere in the last couple of months of my posts.

I just thought I'd get this on the record, because I can't stand all of the mischaracterizations and attempts to sweep the troubling unanswered questions connected with the Mena affair under the rug.

It's to avoid situations like the one you documented at the bottom of page 17 that the so-called "Powell Doctrine" was originally formulated:

# Is a vital national security interest threatened?

# Do we have a clear attainable objective?

# Have the risks and costs been fully and frankly analyzed?

# Have all other non-violent policy means been fully exhausted?

# Is there a plausible exit strategy to avoid endless entanglement?

# Have the consequences of our action been fully considered?

# Is the action supported by the American people?

# Do we have genuine broad international support?

That set of conditions had previously governed U.S. armed interventions- up to the George W. Bush administration. Which does provide yet another example of US Presidents/Commanders-in-chief overruling principles and precedents set by the top military leadership.

I certainly support the idea of a civilian Commander-In-Chief having the power to overrule the advice of even the highest ranking military commanders.

But that doesn't mean I necesarily think it's always a good idea. And I think it was a terrible idea to dispense with the Powell Doctrine, in favor of...well, that was never made clear by George W. Bush.

He wanted the power to start and command wars, he got it, and it's increasingly clear what he did with it.

Now if you all will excuse me for a bit, I'm going to get back to researching how the USA got so into arrears on the rent to Kyrgystan, for the only US armed forces staging base in Central Asia other than Bagram, Afghanistan.

I'm also going to try to figure out what might have been lost if the Kirghiz regime had gotten fed up and evicted us- which they actually voted to do initially, in February of 2009, until the Obama administration managed to renegotiate the lease this summer, thus preserving the base and it's staging capabilities for some time to come. Otherwise, they may have felt a lot of pressure to relocate all of those facilities to Afghanistan...