Letters to the Editor
Asher Steinberg
Published Letters: 231 Editor's Choice: 12
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Re: Glenn
[Read the article: Cokie Roberts speaks out on the war on behalf of the American people]
[Read more letters about this article: Here](2) Did the polls I cite simply ask whether people favor withdrawal, or did they ask if they favor withdrawal regardless of what's going on in Iraq (i.e., regardless of whether we're "winning"?)
The latter, but your i.e. is a little facile, because, like I said, if we were to pull out today, some people would say we won. As I'm sure you know, poll results change dramatically depending on how you phrase a question. I would be willing to bet that if pollsters asked people if they're in favor of withdrawal even if we "lose," you'd at least see pretty different results. Even in Vietnam, Americans didn't want to "lose" the war, though they did, but even today you'll hear it claimed that America has never lost a war, so I do think she's right strictly in the sense that, whatever happens, people would like an outcome which can somehow be interpreted as a victory. Now, like I said, where she probably differs from a majority of Americans is what "winning" would look like, but I don't think you can say that her making a claim about Americans wanting to win is a lie, as you did. The flaw in her argument is that, though Americans would like to win in the abstract, they'd be happy to take what we've got now and call it a victory.
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Other Possibilities
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"Either:
(1) The Bush administration concealed this obviously vital episode from the 9/11 Commission and from everyone else, until Mukasey tearfully trotted it out last week; or,
(2) Mukasey, the nation's highest law enforcement officer, made this story up in order to scare and manipulate Americans into believing that FISA and other surveillance safeguards caused the 9/11 attacks and therefore the Government should be given more unchecked spying powers."
There are some possibilities you missed:
(3), Hamilton is lying or mistaken. Not that I think that's very likely, but it's a logical possibility. Now, why would he lie? Perhaps they were informed, chose to keep it out of the report, and he doesn't want to admit to "concealing this obviously vital episode" from America. Or, maybe he's against unchecked spying powers (as am I) and doesn't want to strengthen any arguments for them. Now, I think what really happened is (4), Mukasey doesn't really know what he's talking about and misspoke. Just as McCain doesn't know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite. It's very possible that Mukasey just got his facts wrong.
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I Redact Possibility 4
[Read the article: Lee Hamilton denies Michael Mukasey's claim about 9/11]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Since DOJ put out a statement saying he was referring to a real call (though theoretically, it's possible that they could've just been standing behind his misstatement - that kind of thing does happen pretty often).
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On Yoo
[Read the article: Various items]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Let me first say that, as someone who will soon be applying to law schools, I was shocked by Yoo's memo. Aside from the fact that he's trying to provide a legal defense for torture, his reasoning is so poor, his disregard for the law is so great, that for a minute or two I thought about voting for Obama in the general election. That all said, this wasn't a huge news story. For one thing, we've known of this memo for years and had some general notion of what it said. For another, half of it repeats in verbatim the Bybee memo, which has been declassified for years. Indeed, probably the most shocking parts, certainly the only parts that your average consumer of news media is going to be able to understand, are those which are just copied and pasted from the Bybee memo, i.e. the discussions of severe pain and profound mental disruption. The parts which are new in the Yoo memo, like the infamous "the Fourth Amendment is not applicable to domestic military operations" footnote or the parts about the President not being bound by the Convention Against Torture, are a little too technical for many people to follow or care about. Third, the memo's been inoperative for four years. And fourth, it's just not the sort of thing that cable news is really equipped to cover, nor is it, I'm afraid, the kind of thing that will help boost advertising revenue. Now you ask why this gets less press than Obama bowling. For starters, it's current, it's not something that happened five years ago. But more importantly, this kind of drivel, sadly enough, is the type of thing people base their votes on. Now you can blame that on the media and say this just fits the pattern of news outlets depicting Democratic candidates as effete out-of-touch snobs, but if I were so inclined I could argue that the media's traditionally depicted Republicans as stupid and gaffe-prone, from Gerald Ford through Reagan to Bush, Quayle, and our current Bush. Ten times as much fuss was made over Ford tripping over an airplane ramp than Obama's bowling game. Now would the media do us all a service if they stopped talking about bowling games and trips and how Bush says strategery when he means strategy, of course, but it's not the media's job to elevate our national discourse, and they'd go out of business if they tried. If intelligent commentary about the issues that really matter made money, cable news would look like bloggingheads.tv. The real explanation for a lot of the stuff you complain about isn't shortsightedness or conservative bias, it's that news has become a business like anything else. It's not like it used to be, where the three networks put on news shows as a public service and the Sulzburgers were happy to break even every year as long as they put out a good paper.