Letters to the Editor
Wendell
Published Letters: 21
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Re the Torture Signing Statement
[Read the article: The dictator defense]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What does Professor Cole make of the next phrase (after the one quoted) in Bush's signing statement--the one about the courts? Even though I am a lawyer, I have not been able to parse through that, but it appears to say that the courts cannot review the Absolute Monarch's, oops el Presidente's determination to ignore the law as and when he sees fit.
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But surely no one could have imagined...
[Read the article: A note is nice, but how about overturning Roe?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that any President would blow off so many warnings on so many subjects from so many advisers, now could they?
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The only viable course
[Read the article: Giving Democrats a pass on ending the war?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To pass anything, it will take 60 votes in the Senate, including about 12 Republicans. To enact anything, it will take 2/3rds majorities in both chambers. Knowing that they presently fall far short of those sorts of whip counts, I can understand why the Dem leadership is treading cautiously. (Plus, I think, they are still afraid of being blamed for the "loss of Iraq".)
I found myself agreeing with the Obama/Rich dialogue in yesterday's Times (Select):
But he has no messianic pretensions and is enough of a realist to own up to the fact that his proposal has no present chance of becoming law. Nor do any of the other end-the-war plans offered by Congressional Democrats — some overlapping his, some calling for a faster exit than his. If a nonbinding resolution expressing mild criticism of President Bush’s policy can’t even come to a vote in the Senate, legislation demanding actual action is a nonstarter. All the Democrats’ parrying about troop caps, timelines, benchmarks, the cutting off of war funding, whatever, is academic except as an index to the postures being struck by the various presidential hopefuls as they compete for their party’s base. There simply aren’t 60 votes in the Senate to force the hand of a president who, in Mr. Obama’s words, “is hellbent on doing what he’s been doing for the last four years. Unless, of course, Republicans join in. The real point of every Iraq proposal, Mr. Obama observes, is to crank up the political heat until “enough pressure builds within the Republican Party that they essentially revolt.”
So, what maximizes the pressure? Forcing frequent pro-administration votes would seem productive...
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Someone Has To...
[Read the article: Terrible hatred and anger on the left]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...get this important imformation to Elizabeth Edwards soonest! I seriously doubt, as they had their 4 kids, that she knew what her husband was.
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Another possibility
[Read the article: Comey's testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn,
I think, in evaluating the program, you may be being a little too lawlerly here. Refashioning of the "President's Program" wouldn't have to be, wouldn't even necessarily be about whipping up a new (AUMF) justification. After all, that takes no more time (or effort) than writing a legal brief.
I expect that someday, when all this is revealed, we will find that the refashioning was technological/methodological within the NSA: perhaps adding constraints on the possibility of human intervention prior to the computer screening processes, or perhaps tightening the "degrees of separation" of allowable surveillance or the like. It happened too quickly to be the development and installation of a new computer system. It had to have been more in the nature of flipping switches in, or putting new limits on the capabilities of something that was already built. Now maybe Comey et.al. decided that the AUMF justification also required limitation of what had gone on before, but that conclusion itself would involve technological/methodological changes by the NSA--and it most probably were those that the senior WH thugs, uh staff, were resisting and trying to subvert/supplant.
(You need to pay more attention to how real people actually implement lawyers' and the law's decrees--like how companies build Sarbanes-Oxley compliance mechanisms: this was, most probably, much the same, but in a different context.)
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An earlier incarnation
[Read the article: Fred Thompson, "tough guy" and "folksy cultural conservative"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn,
When you said "There is nothing in Fred Thompson's life that he has actually done that makes him "a tough guy" in the sense Fineman means it", are you forgetting his bullying of, for instance, John Dean when Thompson was minority counsel to the Senate Watergate Committee?
I think the 'toughness' he displayed then would qualify him well for the kind of misguided, uninformed, culturally insensitive and ineffective interrogations that we are now, unfortunately, too often doing.
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News
[Read the article: Al-Qaida does it, too]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Perhaps Surber, as a mere blogger, does not, but surely Tarnato, as a fully credentialled WSJ reporter, does know that it is news when a man bites a dog, and it is not news when a dog bites a man.
But now we are to believe that both bites are equivalently newsworthy, and the one justifies the other, given the fierceness of the fight.
Well, no.
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Heather...and everyone else:
[Read the article: I Like to Watch]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]You will note, in that interview, in a direct quote, Chase said: "...you would know that Tony doesn't get killed..."
I was of the view that the 'going to black' did reflect the on-the-boat discussion with Bobby--and that Tony had gotten whacked. But if the writer of the script says differently--and he has--I'm too proudly a member of the reality-based community to continue to believe otherwise.
With that settled, we're now in a position, as your column has, to contemplate and consider and criticize the wisdom, and the reasons, for that aesthetic choice.
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Scooter is a good illustration of Glenn's point
[Read the article: What "truly motivates" George W. Bush?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't think all those letters were lies. They establish that Scooter is a genuinely nice man: plays catch with the neighbors' kids, makes time for his friends etc. etc.
He also was instrumental in ginning up an immensely destructive war, in helping to conceal that ginning up, and then lying about his efforts under oath.
Good? Evil? Both, sometimes, and both at (different) times.
The older I get, the less I find anything (except the Sopranos finale, as shown on the screen) to be pure black or white. Manicheanism, or its more recent Cartesian dualism guise are almost always wrong: its very rarely either/or and almost always, in some measure, both/and.