Letters to the Editor
mattwa33186
Published Letters: 395 Editor's Choice: 41
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Kitt
[Read the article: The complete myth driving our Iraq "debate"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What I saw was a lot of bitching and whining about how the war was morally wrong, how violence was not a solution to the problem, etc... - not arguments that were going to gain any traction post 9/11, especially in the face of the supposed presence of WMDs.
What I did not see was many people expressing actual anger that our government was about to embark on a venture as apocalyptically stupid as a war that could never end with an "enemy" that was actually our greatest resource in the region. The true geo-political ramifications of occupying Iraq were never discussed in the press, and even the most concerned and involved Americans rarely leave the boxes that their media heroes build for them any more.
If there was ever a time when the media needed to earn the privileges afforded them by the First Amendment, that was it. They failed miserably. Now they attempt to defend themselves by saying that we, the citizens, were either unwilling to listen to them or too willing to be led down the path we wanted to take in the first place, rather than admit that their arguments failed because they used the wrong arguments.
They couldn't persuade us because there is nothing more persuasive than the truth, and they kept that in their pockets if they weren't to dim to see it in the first place.
And now we get to listen to guys like this bozo blaming us, or blaming the Democrats, blaming anyone but themselves. Enough. Yes, the Democrats have largely proven themselves cowards, but even they shouldn't have to take this shit from a group that has taken one of the most sacred rights guaranteed under the Constitution and turned it into a tool for making up stories about movie stars instead of one for confronting and exposing our government. Whatever the outcome of this war, the media is complicit.
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But Carter was so much more than that :)
[Read the article: When Democrats collapse]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Carter was (and is) an arrogant, intellectual idealogue who studiously ignored everyone's advice because no one was as smart as he was or was able to see the big picture as well as he did. He was an expert in military planning and strategy, over riding the mission commander of the failed hostage rescue attempt (who was prepared to continued because he actually planned to lose half his helicopters on the way). He was an expert in energy policy, ignoring experts who told him that everything he was doing was a panacea that would give us months at best and that we needed to encourage and even force industry to pursue alternatives immediately. And he was an expert in economics, ignoring thousands of economists who had written books and won nobel prizes and were telling him for 4 years how to relieve inflationary pressure caused by oil prices.
You can say that other presidents failed in many of the same ways, but Carter's sin was that he never implemented a real solution to a problem because he can't understand that problems are real, not intellectual excercises, and wouldn't listen to anybody who did.
All this from a guy who was elected only because of political backlash against the Republicans and because he was a nice guy, viewed as harmless, the anti-Nixon. Just goes to show, there is no such thing as a harmless President.
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I agree
[Read the article: Is Rush Limbaugh right?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But I think the removal of the equal time requirement was a symptom of corporate control of the media and the government that took hold around that time. For a long time, the news divisions at major TV and radio stations were money losers, the price industry paid for using the public airwaves. And they were, for the most part, fair and honest. At some point, in the late 70's, coporations came to view themselves as citizens and worse, came to be viewed as citizens by the courts and the legislatures, and therefore had no obligation to provide anything in return for making billions from the use of citizen owned airwaves. News became another profit center, and we lost our free press.
I also thank God for the internet, and I am glad to see the major media outlets are beginning to lose their battle to marginalize any news source that doesn't have a single digit station ID or can't point proudly to the number of trees they kill in order to "keep us informed".