Letters to the Editor
emaydon
Published Letters: 54
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I can't speak about Pravda...
[Read the article: Brit Hume and the Bush administration take propaganda to a new level]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Because I am no Russian expert, and have never visited the country.
But I can say something about the South African Broadcasting Corporation ("SABC") as I grew up during the apartheid years in Johannesburg, where "news" came pretty much from one source.
And this Fox effort, minus the jazzy graphics and powerpoint slides, was eerily like what we got back in South Africa in the 1980's. SABC people who have since spoken out about what it was like dealing with the government have described the "interview" process as follows: you submit to the relevant ministry your list of questions. The ministry would decide for you what question you could ask and send the list back. You would resend your clean-lined list of questions back to the ministry.
The relevant minister would then prepare his answers, and attend the interview on the precondition that the journalist did not deviate from the pre-agreed set of questions. And that's how the system worked, you would have these ministers drone on with their interminable monologues, and journalists signed up to not asking any relevant follow up questions.
You can perhaps make the case that Brit Hume and his doozy sycophants are actually worse than the SABC minions, though at least some SABC people have been willing to admit since that what they were doing was not journalism.
And I will say this - Brit Hume is a carbon copy, without the Afrikaner accent, of the type of journalist the SABC went for. A elderly guy with authoritarian gravitas, who just helped the ministers lob their propaganda. The SABC archives are chock-full of these ridiculous interviews - not sure how much they were like Pravda, but Hume sure does a good rendition of what we were pounded with some 20 years ago.
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Dem response...
[Read the article: One-sided rules of political debate]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Do you know how the Democrats responded to the GOP tools who monotonously asked them to register their disapproval of the Moveon ad?
I missed most of the hearings, but was there a Dem who fired back that they would not dignify the GOP question with a response?
FWIW, I thought the Moveon ad was unhelpful and out of order. Paul Rieckhoff's views, as published on Huffpo, correlate with my own. But the idea that Dems should allow the GOP to ritually bash them with some irrelevance is what helps the Moveon ad become a story. That and Joe Klein carping on about what a moral outrage the ad was.
For anyone needing a definition of shrill, Klein provides it here.
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Joe Klein...
[Read the article: Limitless wrongness]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn,
Your BFF, Joe Klein, offered this conclusion:
"It seems clear the President has won this round. An optimistic general will trump a skeptical politician anytime."
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1661686,00.html
Much of Klein's article is sensible, but as ever, Time's franchise DC commentator has measured the political temperature by sticking the thermometer where the sun don't shine.
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Goldberg
[Read the article: Follow-up to the silence from the ADL regarding Fox News and right-wing talk radio]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was aware that his book-title had seen several incarnations, but I had not seen the blurb before and this piece stuck out:
"Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism"
Leaving aside whatever comparisons he wants to make, let's not miss this point:
FDR went to war against and ultimately destroyed Hitler's Germany. Yet it is clear that Goldberg nevertheless regards it as legitimate to compare their domestic policies.
Ergo, it must be just as legitimate to compare, I dunno, Bush and Ahmedinejad. It might only be a poor man's Cold War, but they don't like each other and by Goldberg's standard it is okay to compare, say their theocratic leanings, anti-empirical faith-based policy development and social conservatism.
It must be okay, right? You know, to write a book prefaced by "Liberal McLefty reminds us that the original religio-fascists were really on the right, and that conservatives from Ronald Reagan to George W Bush to Rick Santorum have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Khomeini's Iran".
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I nominate this:
[Read the article: A nation of Rich Lowrys]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"A war has probably never been so debated and so little understood as the one in Iraq."
For the most unintentionally revealing comment of the year.
In the public arena at least (i.e. on teevee), the war has been debated at great length. On one side, you've had the hawks. On the other, you've had the uber-hawks.
Topics these Geniuses covered included: Saddam's WMD, costless reconstuction, fast-track democracy, fighting them over there, foreign meddling in Iraq, staying the course, surges, how the Democrats are weak on national security.
Lowry is a fully paid up member of the punditocracy. He speaks on their behalf. The idea that Iraq is "little understood" is a judgement he may pass on his own milieu. Anthony Zinni, Brent Scowcroft, Juan Cole, amongst many experts foresaw the problems of occupying Iraq.
Lowry didn't. His debate club didn't either. And now he claims everyone else doesn't understand what's going on.
I'm sure psychiatrists have a name for this. No sane person could surely make such a fool of himself.
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Late to the party...
[Read the article: A bizarre, unsolicited e-mail from Gen. Petraeus' spokesman ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But what an extraordinary exchange.
Perhaps someone else has commented on this, but there is an apparent contradiction in the original Boylan email.
He writes: "As for working in secret with only certain media [this claim] is laughable."
Next paragraph: "...you published our email conversation without asking, without permission -- just another case in point to illustrate your lack of standards and ethics."
Ergo, Boylan's "standards and ethics" hold that his email conversations (and presumably all communications) with journalists/bloggers are private. Yet he finds it comical that by holding to this standard, he might be suspected of working furtively with certain journalists.
So leaving aside Boylan's pettiness, it appears he's not the sharpest knife in the drawer either.