Letters to the Editor
jtanneru
Published Letters: 45 Editor's Choice: 1
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McCain Equals Bush
[Read the article: Journalists, McCain and the false Iran/al-Qaida link]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The media has failed to pick up on the fact that this candidate not only wants to continue Bush's failed Iraq policy, and continue Bush's misguided saber-rattling toward Iran, but he is also continuing Bush's pattern of misleading the public about the nature of military threats that face this country.
Bush aroused calls for his impeachment for misleading the nation into war. In a supposedly democratic nation, lying is one of the worst offences a leader can commit, and Bush marched right up to the line with misstatements, exaggerations, and surrogates who were willing to outright lie, all to create the impression that a war with Iraq was a retaliation for the terrrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
Not only did two-thirds of the country believe Iraq had attacked us, but one hundred percent of us know that the connection was made. It was a feel-good war, brought to you by the impulse for racial profiling on an international scale. We have been attacked by the Islamofascists, and we must defend civilization from their corrupting influence, whatever that means.
So when McCain makes a misstatement that IRAN is somehow linked to Al Quaeda, and makes the misstatement repeatedly, why can't the media smell the Big Lie? McCain is using the same technique Bush used 4000 dead soldiers ago. Don't they notice it? For a pundit to say "if it were a different speaker, the misstatement would have gotten more attention", is to totally misrepresent the problem with the misstatement. We don't need to be concerned about McCain's experience. We need to be concerned about his willingness to continue Bush's policy of misleading the nation about the so-called Global War On Terror. If McCain is already lying about the nature of the threat embodied in Iran, why would he stop once he is elected?
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It's time for an independent investigation
[Read the article: "History will not judge this kindly"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We don't have the Independent Counsels anymore, but if there was ever a situation that called for one, this is it. The country and the world need to know the exact level of responsibility for each person.
Then we can start prosecuting.
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I Want More Exposure
[Read the article: "We'll make you see death"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In newsrooms around the country editors are deciding that this is just "not news" because it isn't sexy. That's plain wrong! If this isn't as provocative as "Holy Sex", or Paris Hilton, or whether sexism/racism is a greater obstacle to Hillary Clinton/Barack Obama, that is just too bad. Journalists need to cover these stories anyway! Editors need to print them.
This is news, even if it is from 2002 or 2003. South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission understood that the truth needs to be known for healing to take place. Hell, even Dateline shows true crime stories from many years ago.
To clear up the confusion of Elephants-Who-May-Also-Be-Men, these are not "crooks picked up on the streets of New York". They aren't actually criminals at all. They are prisoners of war. If you're gonna call this a war, you gotta call them prisoners of war. And as such, they should be treated better than common criminals, not worse.
We can't win by becoming our enemy. This isn't the "Dexter" tv show where the only way we can defeat the terrorists is to be terrorists ourselves.
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Great!
[Read the article: Huckabee to follow in Robertson's footsteps?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Another conservative Christian orgnization. Just when I didn't think my week could get any better.
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His Only Point
[Read the article: More on Michael Mukasey's false 9/11 and FISA claims]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn writes:
So it's hard to believe -- to put it mildly -- that Mukasey's only point was that foreign-to-foreign calls shouldn't require warrants, since (a) nobody contests that and (b) no warrants were required for such calls as of 9/11.
Mukasey's point was to raise the 9/11 bogeyman about the need for expanding FISA in a deceptive way, and it has worked so far:
- He makes an outrageous claim that the NSA could have prevented the attacks if they had this authority before 2001.
- He's asked to defend the claim.
- He pretends to defend the claim by referencing secret documents, while at the same time essentially backing off the claim.
- No one is able to follow up on the pretended defense because the documents are unavailable. A few Glenn Greenwald readers notice the deception but the media largely ignores the story -- these readers are not the intended audience for the deception anyway.
- A rumor persists that FISA limitations caused 9/11.
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@shooter242
[Read the article: More on Michael Mukasey's false 9/11 and FISA claims]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]and which would have prevented the 9/11 attacks
Mukasey didn't say that. He said...
"We didn't know precisely where it went."
(snip)"We got three thousand. . . . We've got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn't come home to show for that," he said, struggling to maintain his composure.
Conflating that into blaming the miss of a single phone call for all of 9/11 is dishonest. Quite frankly, I'm real tired of it.
How is that conflation?
Mukaskey's "and didn't come home to show for that" sure sounds like blame to me.
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"$56,757,500 million"
[Read the article: DNC challenges McCain on campaign finance]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is a lot of money. Who's his opponent? Iraq?
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This is gonna backfire
[Read the article: Rove willing to testify -- except when he's not]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What if his fingerprints are not all over this? What if it's just a partial fingerprint, but someone else from the White House influenced the investigation? Or someone else in the party? Or at the state level? If Siegelman insists on going after Rove rather than investigating the investigation itself, then he's going to be the one that is hurt if Rove manages to stay above the whole thing.
And lets face it, Rove is a very slippery character. Does anyone remember the perp-walk fantasies buzzing around the blog during the Valerie Plame affair?