Letters to the Editor
jebldmm
Published Letters: 933 Editor's Choice: 164
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I'm not going with either ...
[Read the article: Peace is at hand in the pointless DVD war]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]... nor am I getting a new tv. We have a perfectly good television that we spent way too much on (just before big screen tv's prices crashed) along with a bunch of DVD's that will become obsolete in a few years and videos that are already obsolete. The game seems to be to come up with new technology that encourages people to spend tons of money for the latest format, only to replace that format with a newer one a few years down the road (i.e. records, 8-tracks, cassetts, cd's, mp3's). I'm not playing anymore. I have better things to do with my money than pay for Blu-ray or HD-DVD marketing executives Porsches.
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I feel as if the media have decided the election
[Read the article: Illustrative New Hampshire snippets]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]They spin, we vote. Edwards wasn't "sexy", so he was overlooked. The constest between "a black man" and "a woman named Clinton" was the story. Now, the story is the "downfall" of a "Clinton". What chance does Democracy have without a free and unbiased media?
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It's hard enough to get the truth about things that have happened
[Read the article: And sometimes, people are just wrong]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't really expect the media to accurately report things that haven't happened yet. It would be nice, however, to get more news and less spin from supposedly responsible journalists. I used to go to the opinion section for opinions and the front page for facts, but lately it has gotten very hard to tell the two sections apart.
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Does it matter who he was referring to?
[Read the article: "Shuck and jive"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It shouldn't. Language should not be right or wrong based on the race of the target. If a lynching comment is tasteless, then it's tasteless regardless of whether the subject is black or white. If "shuck and jive" is an insult, then it's an insult regardless of the race of the target. There are certain phrases/words that are definitively racist. Context doesn't matter when you use those words - you could use one of them to refer to a white person or black person and give equal offense. If we are going to keep holding everything anybody says about Obama to a racial test, it's going to be a long year. What's next... if somebody says that Obama is "tap-dancing around the truth", is that a racist reference to archaic black dancing cliches? What about if they say "the issue isn't as black and white as it appears"? Is that a racist phrase? There are dozens, if not hundreds, of perfectly innocent phrases in our vocabulary that can be taken as racial sleights, if we choose to interpret them that way.
If we want to seriously consider electing a black man as President of the United States, we are going to have to stop constantly emphasizing his race and start treating him like we would any other candidate. He's not running as "a black man". He's running as an American citizen who wants to be president. We can start by not parsing every campaign speech, by candiates or their supporters, for racial insults. If somebody utters a truly offensive racial insult - we won't need to parse, it will be obvious.
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It didn't look very sexy to me
[Read the article: Boobs to cure cancer?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]These are not, by and large, sexy photos. There are pictures of mastectomies, droopy breasts, fully clothed breasts, tops with cleavage. I don't think it would so interesting, but it gets cool when you click over a picture and see the dedication. This isn't Hustler, or even Playboy. It's just women showing whatever they are comfortable showing. In all honesty, I kind of like it, although the picture I saw of a woman with a mastectomy gave me a shake.
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Why do people hate the Clinton's?
[Read the article: More about race and the Democrats]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bill Clinton was not a bad president, but I remember the media attacks beginning before he was ever in office. They obsessed over "Whitewater" which was the biggest non-scandal ever. They grabbed every negative and ran with it. Now they seem to be doing the same with Hillary Clinton, and I don't know why. I often fall into the "I don't really support Hillary Clinton" trap, myself. In order to have any credibility in the liberal blogosphere, you have to say that. Liberals/Progressives seem to hate Hillary Clinton as much as they hate Bush. What has she done to deserve this? What did Bill Clinton do to deserve the attacks?
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Is his drug use a barrier?
[Read the article: Stop him if you've heard this one before]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why isn't there more discussion of Obama's past drug use? Why is this an untouchable story? The party line seems to be that mentioning drug use in the context of a black candidate is racist, but I can't for the life of me see why. Obama wasn't an inner city child pressured to use drugs by gangs. He was a middle class kid who snorted cocaine to avoid teenage angst. This was not standard behaviour among teenagers of his age (I was a teenager during that era, and travelled with fairly "adventurous" kids, and none of us ever used cocaine). At best, this can be an inspirational story of how he found focus in life and rejected the drug culture. But that's not how it's being played - instead the implication is that any mention of his drug use is racism. I don't like that. Drugs are not a "black" issue. They have nothing to do with race. To my knowledge, no president in U.S. history has admitted to using hard drugs before they were elected. Bush hasn't admitted it, even though it is widely recognized that he did so. How will this effect Obama in the election? How do American's feel about teenage drug use? Will this become an issue after the primaries?
If we don't discuss and dismiss this now, I guarantee that the Republicans will be bringing it up as a "character" issue during the presidential campaign. And I'm betting that nobody is going to buy the "but that's racist and you should ignore it" line when they do.