Letters to the Editor
cabdriver
Published Letters: 594 Editor's Choice: 8
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@libertyson
[Read the article: The mix master]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]the Baby Boomer approach to race which is generally accepted by all of their generation and rejected by the next.
Kindly don't overgeneralize. After all, it's that sort of intellectual laziness that perpetuates phenomena like racism and sexism in the first place. The difference is that racism and sexism have lost much of their their cachet and become relatively unfashionable, while other types of pejorative stereotyping, like generation-based bashing, still makes for easy cheap shots.
"You're all like this, and you're all like that..." Spare me.
Hence the support, and even questionable tactics, of many public African-American Clinton supporters like Bob Johnson owner of BET(insinuating Obama did drugs)
"Obama doing drugs" is not an insinuation: it's a fact. Furthermore, he didn't hide that history: he spoke of it candidly in his autobiography, Dreams From My Father.
And you can bet that as surely as the Republicans are gonna be going out of their way to avoid overtly making Barack Obama's ethnic identity as issue in the upcoming election, they're going to throw his illegal drug use in his face- making it a "character issue."
I hope that somewhere, Barack Obama and his campaign people are readying themselves for that eventuality. The questions it will bring up are surely both more challenging to the candidates, and more intriguing to a curious public, than matters of his ascribed identity.
You know, questions like "how did a teenage pothead and coke user manage to keep enough brain cells to maintain the ability to edit the Harvard Law Review, and write such an articulate memoir?" and "Does a candidate who literally owes his personal fortune to his father-in-law, one of the biggest alcohol dealers in Arizona, really have room to press the drug issue against his opponent?"
Yeah. Let's have that discussion.
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berlet98
[Read the article: He's a young black guy, and that's a problem for some folks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]From berlet98's signature, I gather that he may just be Gene Lalor, author of A Immodest Proposal for Ending and Winning the War on Terror: A Curmudgeon's Plan for Survival.
From the book blurb:
"The United States can only survive, Lalor asserts, if we
understand some fundamental facts:
* We’re not immortal, either as individuals or a nation;
* Our cherished rights and privileges as a people are strangling us as a nation.
* With this Islamic foe, if we don’t kill them first, they’re going to kill us."
Elsewhere in Salon, berlet98 holds forth with yet another of those apologies for the USA adopting the operant conditioning methods pioneered by the Soviet Stalinists and formerly employed so diligently by the North Koreans, based on the same old "Hollywood hypothetical" fantasy screenplay that these types always use to justify the jettisoning of "Our cherished rights and privileges as a people" which "are strangling us as a nation"- except that Lalor doesn't even conjure a specific "ticking timebomb scenario" to explain away the capitulation to totalitarian methods- he simply counts on overheated rhetoric to do the job:
"your family has been targeted by some fanatical, religious nutcase and the nutcase’s buddies. You have irrefutable information that their plan is to execute you, your wife, kids, grandkids, friends, neighbors, everyone you know, and they’ve already shown their expertise at such executions by killing thousands of others. Their Nutcase Army is on record as despising you and everyone you know and love—as well as everyone you may not know and love—and is pledged to make all of you dead and their modus operandi shows they won’t conduct the slaughter mercifully.
Now, remembering that this is all hypothetical..."
He goes on like that for a few more paragraphs, breathing down the readers necks like some barfly with a captive audience (ever been there? I have.)
You got it: a Class A Cornball.
Unfortunately, the proposals that berlet98 supports aren't "hypotheticals", at all, at all: they're part of the New American Order decreed several years back by his Fearless Leader, George W. Bush.
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@Truthfully
[Read the article: He's a young black guy, and that's a problem for some folks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"in his "Just Words" speech he cited,"I have a dream, All men are created equal, We have nothing to fear but fear itself, Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country".
What was that about?
What was the message in the use of and order of those words?"
I'll field that one.
Sen. Obama was merely providing excerpted statements from speeches previously made by other Americans, which many people found memorable and inspirational. He was doing that to illustrate the value of a well-phrased thought, as part of defending himself against criticism that his own speeches were "just words."
As for the rest of your comment, for the most part it reads to me like the familiar litany of commentary put forth by many white folks toward African-Americans as "the other", consisting of a highlighted litany of complaint and dismay. And it reminds me how little we as a group really have to complain and be dismayed about.
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yep.
[Read the article: He's a young black guy, and that's a problem for some folks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I, too, hear desperation echoing through the comments from the anti-Obama mudslingers...and more than an occasional whiff of the disingenuous.
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Nader
[Read the article: He's a young black guy, and that's a problem for some folks]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since Ralph Nader was brought up--
I'll venture my opinion that Nader would be leagues more effective as the regular host of a talk show than he would be as president of the USA. He has name recognition, he has a lot of contacts, he's erudite, opionated, articulate, and he's good at fielding questions on his feet.
In light of Nader's oft-expressed opinion that American politics hugely over-emphasizes national elections and political campaigns- especially presidential runs- at the expense of issue-oriented political awareness, activism and education, I find it ironic that he's taken to becoming a perennial candidate for president.
Sadly, if Nader did show a serious interest in employment as a talk show host, I think the chances of any broadcast or cable network (even the "liberal alternative" Air America) hiring him, are about equivalent to his chances of being elected president this November.
I'd like to see someone prove me wrong about that.
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@Scanner
[Read the article: Obama's best veep choice]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"O'Bambi"
???