Letters to the Editor
Gator90
Published Letters: 93
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Joe Klein, Champion of Ordinary People
[Read the article: Answers for Joe Klein]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In reading about Joe Klein and "ordinary people," I recalled seeing Klein on a late night talk show some years ago. Klein was wittily disparaging chain restaurants, particularly Red Lobster. (For those who haven't been, Red Lobster provides decent, moderately priced seafood.) What struck Klein as the "funniest thing" about Red Lobster was the people who have dinner there and "get all dressed up as if it were a nice restaurant." He then laughed heartily. It's funny, see, because people of modest means, who may not be able to afford to dine like celebrity Beltway pundits, actually have the nerve to wear nice clothes when they go out to dinner at a restaurant in their price range.
I remember this clearly because it was one of the snottiest, most aggressively elitist things I've ever heard a public figure say. And I thought, what a fucking asshole. Pardon the vitriol.
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If not now, when?
[Read the article: What will be done about James Comey's revelations?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"a time may be rapidly aproaching when any neat political calculations of benefits are superflous, and the necessity of removing Bush, Cheney and others from office will overide anything else" -- Mooser
We've been at that point since November 2002 (at the latest). It's raining, dude, it's raining!!
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Semi-Random Reactions to This Post
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Attacking civilians is as American as apple pie. Many (perhaps most) Americans regard U.S. participation in WW2 as our most heroic national achievement, one in which we quite intentionally incinerated hundreds of thousands (millions?) of German and Japanese civilians. America doesn't do anything unjustified, so of course attacking civilians can be justified in some circumstances, like when America does it.
Evidently Malkin et al want me to be terrified of terror bombings in America by Muslim Americans. As of now, I'm still more concerned about terror bombings by white, ostensibly Christian Americans, which have, you know, actually happened.
This is pure guesswork, but with respect to those American Muslims who indicated that civilian attacks could be justified in some circumstances, I'd bet at least some of them were thinking specifically of Palestinian attacks against Israel, and declining to implicitly condemn them by branding all civilian attacks as unacceptable. This merely reflects the bilateral savagery of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and has nothing to do with the spectre of home-grown "suiciders" in the U.S.
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Hume's Ghost
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Actually, the British did the bulk of bombing of German civilian areas in WWII. The American air support came later in the war and the US command was more strict about targeting military targets and avoiding civilian facilities."
--Hume's Ghost
I don't want to go on too much of a historical tangent, HG, but google American, bombing, and Dresden. Then tell me how "strict" we were about confining our German bombing to military targets.
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The White Man's Payload
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]HG, if you kept reading the Wikipedia entry, you read about the thousands of tons of explosive and incendiary bombs U.S. pilots dropped on a German city of no military significance. (Part of our role was to kill off the wounded whom the Brits had inadvertently left alive in the first wave of bombings.) To be sure, we were even more wanton in Japan, due in part, I'm sure, to racial considerations.
One of the biggest reasons I've come to sort of hate my country in recent years is the general indifference of the American public and leadership to the civilian deaths in Iraq for which we are (directly and indirectly) responsible. I sometimes wonder whether, and how, things would be different if Iraq was populated by white and/or Christian people.
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@Paul Dirks and Anonymous
[Read the article: Large number of Americans favor violent attacks against civilians]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]PD, that was very interesting about the Iraqi Christians. I knew nothing about it. Maybe if most Iraqis were Christians, or if they were white, Americans would care more about them. Or maybe not.
Anonymous (snappy handle by the way), no one here has said that Japan and Germany, as nations, were "victims" of the U.S. and Britain. I (and others) have merely pointed out that Americans have shown an inclination in the past to regard the intentional killing of civilians as appropriate under some circumstances. You, in defending the firebombing of Japanese and German civilians, then illustrated the point. No one believes that the Anglo-American bombing campaigns were the worst thing that happened in WW2. Put away the straw man.
On a personal note, I visited Dresden some years back, and was astonished at how much of it was still rubble. It saddened me to look at pictures of how beautiful it was before the war, and to read about how much the civilians suffered. Perhaps reasonable minds can differ on this, but I didn't think they "deserved it," even after visiting Auschwitz on the same trip.
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Myth or Sickening Reality?
[Read the article: The complete myth driving our Iraq "debate"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn's argument assumes that a Congressional vote to de-fund Iraq operations would result in an orderly withdrawal of the U.S. military from Iraq. But what if President Bush orders that no withdrawal take place? What if he says, "Gosh, it's a shame the Democrats want to deprive our troops of the things they need to defend themselves, but the U.S. presence in Iraq is necessary to protect Americans from Al Qaeda, so if the Democrats force our troops to throw rocks at the enemy, that is what they'll have to do."
It seems that Alter's position is premised on two underlying assumptions: (1) that Bush would not allow a withdrawal to follow a de-funding vote; and (2) that Bush would, successfully, blame the Democrats for any resulting harm to U.S. troops. I don't think the Democrats should have capitulated to the threat of that scenario, but isn't that what they did? In other words, the notion that de-funding would harm the troops is sad and twisted, but given the character of the man who occupies the White House, not necessarily irrational.