Letters to the Editor
omooex
Published Letters: 977 Editor's Choice: 5
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The Regular Folks...
[Read the article: Megan McArdle and Dan Drezner's defense of the media]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I agree with Glenn and others who note that its not the media's place to be determining what "regular folks" want. It would be interesting to trace when this particularly virulent idea emerged--that the press should give their adherents what it is they think they want--rather than pursue the media's original and traditional purpose as a tool for the public to use in its burden of democratic participation.
That being said. I wouldn't disagree with the premise that most regular folks would prefer presidential bowling stories than know anything about Yoo. In fact, they would stenuously resist any attempt at educating them on any governmental issue. I don't refer to polls or studies or anything like that in my opinion. I have lived in New York, Barcelona, San Francisco, Oakland and its satellites, London, New Orleans and Ramallah. I come from a pretty average, working class place, my siblings and their friends, are pretty average apolitical knuckleheads, as are the people I went to high school with, etc. The only place I ever lived where the (wo) man on the street was interested and knowledgeable about political issues domestic and otherwise, was Ramallah. Its no coincidence that the place was under siege.
Americans today just don't give a crap. Perhaps if there was a draft, or if Yoo's opinions were being used to justify domestic indefinite administrative detention. But there's not. Things will have to get a lot worse before Americans start reading the paper as a matter of survival.
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This may be going out on a limb...
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think its obvious what Mukasey was up to. His statement fits in neatly with the Bush admin's crap about how FISA needs to be revised because it couldn't prevent 9-11. But there is a danger in pursuing this one statement too passionately.
If you look at the quote, it seems reasonable that Mukasey could argue, in his defense that he was speaking figuratively. The previous statement about Iraq is hypothetical, "the call we really want to know about." Then "that's the call we didn't know about." before 9-11. He could mean in all of the years before 9-11--of course, he would argue that anyway. thea call. Its obvious that he's making the whole thing out of whole cloth, but he could argue that he was speaking in figurative terms. I don't think his comment is blatant enough, or that your argument is strong enough to keep pursuing it like this. It was certainly very misleading. But I think he could argue quite well that he referred to a hypothetical situation in the past, just as he was referring to a hypothetical situation in the present.
Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody with a phone in Iraq picks up a phone and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."
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Whoa did I get my tags mixed up...
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]sorry
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bdop4
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not saying that's what he meant. I'm saying that's what he'll argue. No doubt succesfully in the context of the previous AG's whoppers. My comment is to note that this will end up being a dead end, not because Glenn is wrong, but because Mukasey will shrug it off handily.
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Paul Dirks...
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Maybe he'll get a nine-eleven split.
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SalilM argues my point much more eloquently
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]that's what I mean; it is hard to write cogent posts whilst laboring beneath the obsessive guilt produced by so irresponsibly avoiding work in this fashion. Get me
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Another of Mukasey's lies at the Commonwealth Club
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I was listening to the Commonwealth club broadcast on NPR in my car the other night, actually. One of the things that caught my attention was his defense of telecom immunity. His point was more or less, that the telecoms were told that what they were being told to do was legal at the time. Thus, he argued, on moral grounds, that it wuold be unjust to hold them legally accountable now. The idea that the Telecoms would do the bidding of the government without first calling up their legion of lawyers stuck me as the most absurd image. Mukasey must surely know that there were telecoms that questioned the legality of what they were being asked to do, and refused to go along. This strikes me as a much more blatant case of lying. I'm sure there are plenty more whoppers in the speech, that are stronger than the Afghanistan safe-house.
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Paul Dirks
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think there is a danger in conflating people's understanding of the upside-down logic used by admin-bots with agreement with it. I don't think anyone here is agreeing that Mukasey was understandably using a hypothetical. I think the argument is, given the absurd logics that we have encountered from previous AG's and beyond, that Mukasey should find it easy to weasle out of the blame. There is enough vague language in the statement to do so, the average person is not going to parse it out as neatly as has been done here. What matters in the end is not reality, but perception, and we have seen that Bush and his flunkies are pretty good at creating perception.
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Sheeiit...
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I didn't know that the DOJ backed him up on it. It took them eight years to find the call? My god, what a-holes.
Disregard my earlier critique--it holds true until April fourth, as noted, and then your on your own Mukakee.
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I had a chance to read Glenn's earlier post...
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I had a chance to read Glenn's earlier post, and, it seems like the DOJ was just playing damage control, trying to conflate Mukasey's off the cuff remark, with its own proprietary red herring viz a viz the hijacker who "communicated with a known overseas terrorist facility while he was living in the United States".
Mukasey, on the other hand, was probably hoping to use the civilian venue to further the propaganda. Of course, he can claim that he mispoke at any time, that the call was hypothetical and had nothing to do with DOJ's own bs "call from the hijacker". They can now be two seperate items of bullshit. The bottom line is that the media won't pick up this story, no one knows and no one will care. This goes into the rather large circular bin of prolific crap the DOJ has been spewing for 8 years now. The DOJ and Mukasey know it, and they are just playing as loose with the facts as they are being allowed to.