Letters to the Editor
dave, who is called dave
Published Letters: 5 Editor's Choice: 1
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Style v. Substance
[Read the article: Alito, you're no John Roberts]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Does Salon have anything substantial to report about the Alito hearings? Today's top two stories fill us in on his performance, demeanor and bald spot...where's the news?
Did he say anything that merits reporting? Was there anything that might lead us to understand his perspective on the law?
What's going on here?
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Cute....
[Read the article: Exclusive: Alexander Hamilton commits suicide]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]...but not nearly as funny as the actual press briefing. For more belly laughs per square inch of text, check out the McClellan briefing transcript:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/02/20060214-1.html
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Yahtzee!
[Read the article: Hitler, Stalin and ... Joe Lieberman?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]This is one the sillier pieces to appear in War Room in sometime. To wit:
1. It was entirely inappropriate for Dick Durbin to compare Gitmo, et. al. to the Hitler's Nazi government. "The stakes were high enough to warrant that sort of language," claimed Tim, ignoring that it might not have been just torture that put the Nazis on the Map of Inhumanity. However brutal our treatment of prisoners, and make no mistake it was (and probably continues to be) brutal, none of us would confuse the goings-on at Abu Ghraib for Auschwitz. That was called genocide. Kinda different.
2. Howard Dean did not compare Katherine Harris to Stalin. In fact, the money quote is "She is not Stalin" (emphasis mine). The reference, as many have pointed out before me, was to Stalin's quote regarding who counts the votes. As a shout-out to a person who counted the votes in favor of the campaign to which she pedged allegiance, the allusion works very well, in my opinion. Also, the non-comparison to Stalin was followed by, "And she will go back to wherever she came from..." Meaning: don't worry. She's nothing. This is not like kicking a dog while she's down, as some have asserted. Rather, it's like kicking a self-satisfied kakistocrat while she's down, which is a whole lot more fun (not to mention legal in some parts of New Jersey).
3. Lump Joe Lieberman in with the Nazis??? ImpeachPAC's pinning of neo-nazis in the military on Lieberman is grasping, to be sure. But to frame that premise as him being "lumped in with Nazis" to bolster your argument is absurd. What do you take us for? I'll give ImpeachPAC the benefit of the doubt; clearly they didn't spend millions of dollars for TV ad time to get us to believe that an Orthodox Jew is a Nazi sympathizer. And it should go without saying that the "Jewish support" that you suppose this ad is attempting to peel away is never going to buy into that argument. So let's see...an ad that shows a pro-war senator with an arrogant disregard for the make-up of our troops, who gets all kissy with President Bush? What could they be saying? Do you really not get that?
Slowly but surely, Salon continues its steady march to the mindless opinionation of the Mainstream Media. Or are the stakes not high enough to warrant that kind of language?
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Loop-the-loopholes
[Read the article: With DeLay's seat at risk, a Republican governor rides to the rescue]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Should we really have a problem with this?
If some technicality of the law requires that a guy who's not running for a seat must be on the ballot, then that law is stupid. And if such a stupid law cannot be amended in time to guarantee that citizens have a chance to vote for candidates on a level playing field, then this seems a fitting solution.
If only Jeb Bush had taken such an interest in ensuring a fair ballot (read: Al Gore, meet Pat Buchanan).
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Whuh???
[Read the article: In Iraq, are there any good options left?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Tim writes:
Yes, even more might have been killed if the U.S. hadn't stepped up its work in Baghdad. But the idea was to reduce the death toll, not slow its increase.
It's these kind of silly statements that dilute an overall point. The idea was not to "reduce the death toll," as Tim asserts. It couldn't have been, for the very simple reason that to reduce a death toll, we would actually have to bring the dead back to life. Can't be done.
Almost as unlikely, though at least in the realm of possibility, would be to prevent further fatalities. Of course, Baghdad is an unpredictable war zone; to set such an expectation would be unrealistic.
The only logical and realistic result of this fortification, then, would be to slow the increase of the death toll. Since there's really no way of proving this either way, this example of a failure in Iraq war planning is just a huge red herring.
The real failure to note is that Baghdad got so chaotic to begin with, and it wasn't until August, 2006 that we thought to step up our military presence there.