Letters to the Editor
kenkapkk
Published Letters: 131 Editor's Choice: 13
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Not ready yet: Redux
[Read the article: Why Bush hasn't been impeached]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Kamiya writes:
"But there's a deeper reason why the popular impeachment movement has never taken off -- and it has to do not with Bush but with the American people. Bush's warmongering spoke to something deep in our national psyche. The emotional force behind America's support for the Iraq war, the molten core of an angry, resentful patriotism, is still too hot for Congress, the media and even many Americans who oppose the war, to confront directly. It's a national myth. It's John Wayne. To impeach Bush would force us to directly confront our national core of violent self-righteousness -- come to terms with it, understand it and reject it. *And we're not ready to do that."*
A number of columns ago, in response to Gary's "America at a Crossoads", I posted a message titled "Not ready yet."
I said then
"As a great admirer of Gary Kamiya, to a certain extent I share his distress at what he believes was a lost opportunity in the PBS series. But I am not surprised at the inability of the network to deal with the subject in a fashion closer to deeper political truths in the manner Kamiya desires. For several reasons.
The first, and the primary one, is that America in general has shown it is not ready yet, nor may be for quite a while, if ever, for such an evaluation. Americans, as I have noted in other letters, are deeply prone to believe their own mythology. It is extemely difficult for this culture to engage in any analysis in depth about anything that contradicts the prevailing notion of the shining city on thhe hill. Even though I do believe that the best elements of our culture and system CAN act as a beacon for others, to see in some revisionist manner that takes in complex historical, sociological, and political realities is, frankly, beyond the intellectual capacity of the society at this time. As another letter writer alluded to, America has not properly processed the Cold War, (or Vietnam for that matter either), so why would we expect America to be able to do so with a subject still so close to the bone."
Glad to see us on the same page and dealing with what is beneath, rather than a more surface analysis. I felt similarly about Reagan/impeachment, but for different reasons. The real rationale, which was unconscious, is that while everyone knew Reagan's offenses demanded impeachment, the country via Congress looked down a road it had just traveled a scant ten years before and realized it did not have the stomach to do it again so soon. If Reagan had been thirty years from Nixon, I believe the trigger might have been pulled, although as many have mentioned, the Ford pardon distorted badly the issue of accountability.
I think also, that in the same vein, the wrenching year of the Clinton impeachment, and the dominance of the right wing power drives, recently blunted, have contributed to the lack of impeachment fervor. Having frivolously burned off enormous energy over nothing with Clinton, there is little left in the tank to seriously deal with Bush, aside from the many other cogent reasons circulating around 9/11 Kamiya cites that have also drained national energy.
A fine analysis, as usual.
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Forensic certainty
[Read the article: For more information]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In all that I read on one of the websites, certain irrefutable facts are not taken intom account. I did not believe in the "single bullet theory", even with Posner's analysis until recent advanced forensic replications demonstrated conclusively that Posner was right. The last was an elaborate recreation using the same rifle bullet, trajectories, bone densities using pig cartiledge, at the exact angles and distances replicating Kennedy and Connelly's positions.
The results mirrored exactly the wounds and trajectory of the bullet, repeated several times, with each bullet not "Pristine" but slightly flattened as was the original. The kicker was when Connelly took off his shirt to show his entrance wound in the back, which was a sideways entrance, consistent with the observation the bullet began tumbling after it hit Kennedy and entered Connelly.
There is no doubt that all shots came from the rear. The sound acoustics from 1975 that indicate a fourth shot have been discredited, by a man who listened to a home recording and realized it came a minute after the Shreriff's instructions after the shootings.
Whether Oswald was the shooter is another story, but as one documentary mentioned, if he had conferderates in the act that set hinm up, there has been no evidence that has surfaced in any way linking him to them. Furthermore other "lynchpins" such as a "bogus" trip to the Cuban embassy in Mexico city have been debunked. He was there, his signature is on the hotel record, and the Cuban/ Russian agents he contacted remember him.
It is hard to refute the advancements in science that have confirmed explicitely things that were thought impossible and demonstrated exactly and replicated exactly and consistently how they wre done.
And I have been a skeptic of the original line for years.
If Oswald was innocent, and other pulled the trigger, no real evidence has surfaced to support that.