Letters to the Editor
smartalec
Published Letters: 49 Editor's Choice: 4
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@ Electro Robot
[Read the article: This Modern World]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Electro, I don't remember having seen any posts of yours before, so please forgive me if I'm reading you incorrectly.
But you seem to be confusing "hoping for" and "fearing." Perhaps you're doing this entirely innocently. But there are many right-wing ideologues for whom this tack is not at all innocent, but a very deliberate and highly polished rhetorical device; it's a subset of the straw-man argument. It's obviously very easy to defeat a total misrepresentation of someone's point. Defeating what leftists (and the vast majority of normal, decent human beings, not just leftists) actually believe and say about the various horrorshows into which our country has been mis-led over the past 7+ years -- that's not so easy.
No rational person -- no minimally decent human being -- ever hoped for any of the manifold catastrophes already visited upon us Americans (and billions of other people in the world), let alone any of the worse that we fear are yet to come.
What we DO hope for is that, sooner or later, someone who's not a complete imbecile, a borderline psychotic, or a moral cipher, will grasp the reigns of power, and at least start getting our country, and the rest of the world, back on track, if not actually beginning to repair the damage (some of it may well be irrevocable already of course).
No, 'lectro (may I call you that? I feel like we're old friends now), WE never desired, nor do we welcome, the deaths of over 4000 servicemen and women, and the lifelong maiming of many thousands more (and that's not even mentioning the Iraqi lives terminated or demolished - about whom people on the right CLAIM to be so concerned, as to require our intervention to bring them "democracy" and "freedom"), in pursuit of an unwinnable war that was predicated on utter lies in the first place, and the prosecution of which has clearly and indisputably made the entire world, and our own country in particular, less safe. Even Petraeus the Great Himself could not manage to bring himself to affirm to Congress recently that we are currently any more safe then before. And since many voices from within the Pentagon and the intelligence community have pointed out that we are now creating anti-American terrorists far faster than we can kill or incapacitate them, anyone who still claims to believe that the Iraqi occupation is "making us safer" is either lying through their teeth or delusional beyond repair.
WE never desired, nor do we welcome the collapse of the dollar, to the point where we hear of some American merchants taking payment only in Euros. WE never desired, nor do we welcome the collapse of the credit system that was the foreseeable, and inevitable, result of abdicating rational oversight of the mortgage and broader credit industries (because, of course, the "free market" solves everything -- except when a Wall Street firm collapses, when suddenly using your tax dollars, and mine, to bail out the firm and its shareholders becomes a necessary corrective. Not that I terribly mind their using your tax dollars, if you voted for these 'pukes -- but I didn't, and am very wroth about it).
WE never desired for anyone to spy on our own citizens; to engage in torture; to violate our own Constitutional guarantees dating back nearly a full millennium. WE never desired a restructuring of the tax system that, just as we said at the time, has not only completely failed to create the promised jobs, but has materially weakened the financial prospects both of the majority of our citizens and of our government (not to mention resulting in the greatest national debt in our country's history). Etc, etc, etc, ad nauseam.
No, 'lectro -- it's the Right that welcomed -- literally, in writing, in public, and nearly a decade in advance -- the catastrophe that 9/11 was to the rest of us. It was the psycho-cons at the Project for the New American Century, not us leftists, who prayed for a "catalyzing... new Pearl Harbor," a prayer answered when 9/11 provided their longed-for ticket to ride. And ride it they have - into all three branches of government, and into the enrichment of the entire war-supply economy,
WE never wanted any of this. All we want -- and this we really, really want -- is that Americans understand that it was the rightwing ideologues who wrought all this devastation. And until we get them out of power, the devastation will not only continue unabated, but worsen.
cheers
smartalec
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I wonder how Fox viewers...
[Read the article: Fox News and the Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...respond to being referred to as "lower-income white voters"?
One thing that the Republican liars -- sorry, communications specialists (from whom Democratic and leftist groups could do to learn a few lessons) -- have always been very good at is pitching their lies -- sorry, communications -- to the biases, conscious and otherwise, of their audiences. And they often seem to know their audiences far better than Democratic and leftist leaders seem to know theirs.
Republican strategists know, of course, about the survey that was done (I think it was around the time of the 2000 election) in which 19% of respondents thought they were in the “top 1%” of earners nationally. (And though this number wasn’t publicized as much, I think it was about 40% in the same survey who thought that they’d eventually be in the top 1%.)
One of the greatest – and most politically damaging, if played right (and the Republicans of course play it very right) -- myths of America is of course that we are a “classless” society (speaking for myself alone, I very clearly lack all class) – or the near-equivalent, that we are all “middle class.”
So what do your typical Fox-viewers think when they hear themselves called "lower-income white voters?" Or do they just write it off as another inevitable insult from the clearly-token-librul Mara Liasson, of NPR and Brown U?