Letters to the Editor
smartalec
Published Letters: 51 Editor's Choice: 4
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Next, the weather here in wingnuttia... cold, so cold
[Read the article: Quote of the day]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"You thought George W. Bush was an over-the-top messianic Christian crusader that you condemned for the public expression of his faith? Nice going. Somebody just upped the ante." -- Fox News anchor John Gibson, speaking Tuesday about former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee
Fox fen might well be -- sorry, almost certainly are -- dumb enough to be fooled by this. But anyone to the left of your average John Bircher, and everyone with a 3-digit IQ (but I repeat myself), knows that it's not progressives, DFHs, "the move-on" crowd, "Defeatocrats," etcetcetc, who are horrified at this "upping of the ante."
The real power in the Republican party -- the supporters of Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, and McCain -- are the ones flipping out that the Christianists are no longer content with just lip-service and a coupla Supreme Court Justices. They're finally wising up to the cynical exploitation that they've suffered at the hands of Republicans these past few decades, and it looks as if they're mad as H-E-double-hockey-sticks, and they're not gonna take it any more.
Leftists, and a growing swath of centrists, couldn't be more delighted that the misbegotten coalitian of neocons, corporate-cons, and Christo-cons is breaking down.
So, Fox-boy, we'll happily see your ante and raise you an Obama and an Edwards...
(Oh, and you can take your Lieberman, too; we're thru with him.)
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A message from on high?
[Read the article: A bad day for Rudy Giuliani]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Repukes fancy themselves as talking directly with God (and in Giuliani's case, probably ordering Him about). Maybe the coincidence of his cancer scare with his first run against Hillary, and this latest health problem with his second, are both Signs?
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There's a Shakespearian or Greek tragedy...
[Read the article: McCain's last stand?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...waiting to be written about McCain.
As so often happens in movies, but so rarely in real life, there were identifiable specific moments in which he made the choices that have brought him to his current low political state. (There is no -- Kelvin zero -- chance that he will be their nominee. That any "journalist" claims otherwise is either a deliberate attempt to create drama in the narrative, or arrant stupidity. Anyone who's ever read the Freepers or Powerline or any other reichwing blog knows this.) His decision not to bolt the Republicans for the Democrats when Jeffords beat him to it in '01. His refusal to campaign for VP with Kerry. His obscene embrace, political, spiritual, and phyiscal, of W. (If you look closely in the photos, you can see him wincing, eyes tight, even as he wraps himself around the boy.)
It really is too bad. The McCain that I saw campaigning in New Hampshire in 2000 could, just possibly, have become the real thing, a politician who might have been willing to put principle and country before party and self. In that campaign, he was the only one that I can recall talking about the growing gap in incomes. (No Democrat that I remember was willing to bring it up at all, at least in those terms. Whether it was fear of the inevitable "class war," "politics of envy" Rethug attacks, or being overly beholden to corporate interests, I don't know, but certainly none of them addressed it as the key issue it clearly was even then.) And how many Senators on either side have been as willing to deal seriously with global warming?
That McCain, and the McCain that called out the Falwells and Robertsons of the world as "agents of intolerance," could have been a great President. But that was just one of the many betrayals of the Republican coalition that ensured that he'd never be accepted by their primary voters. His only chance at electoral success would have been his only chance at political greatness -- either running as an independent, or actually joining the Democrats. Whatever failure of perception or vision led him to think he could ever again be accepted by rank-and-file Republicans, no matter how much he sucked up to their iconic leaders and powers that be, that is McCain's tragic flaw.
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@vschap, re: Dan Rather
[Read the article: Bill Bennett knows black people]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"He [Rather] said something like, 'Obama has shown he's not just another candidate out smiling and shining shoes...' ...If Obama were not a black man, 'shoe shining' would never have sprung to Rather's lips."
I didn't hear the Rather clip, and haven't seen him quoted elsewhere, but it sounds to me that if this quote is reasonably accurate, Rather was probably reaching for a candidate-as-salesman metaphor, and trying to get the line from Miller's "Death of a Salesman" that refers to "a man way out in the blue, riding on smile and a shoeshine."
But if the quote is accurate, it doesn't change a thing about how revealing it is of Rather's mindset; if anything, might make it even worse, to turn "riding on a shoeshine [of his own]" into "shining [someone else's] shoes."
That said, the phenomena of racism (and sexism, anti-semitism, homophobia, ethnocentrism, ageism, classism, looksism, etcetcetc) are a lot more complicated than just catching some superannuated pundit in a revealing Freudian slip in the wee hours of the morning when all kinds of hidden truths tend to slip out. The culture that we live in is steeped in all these attitudes, and any given expression of any of them by authority figures is likely to be both symptomatic and causal.
And very, very few of us can afford the luxury of the comfortable thought that we're beyond all that.
There's an interesting test of underlying attitudes -- of which the possessor is often unaware -- available on the web. If you haven't already given it a looksee, it's worth a few minutes:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/demo/
The experience of participating in the exercises (or tests, if that word isn't too discomfitting) is... interesting. Reminded me of the old Fleetwood Mac song: "I might not give the answers that you want me to." Oh, well...