Letters to the Editor
Obi Wan Quixote
Published Letters: 15
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Not Being Shot At
[Read the article: Hillary Clinton's tough week]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hillary going to Bosnia during the crisis, not being shot at is, surely, a great deal more experience of the situation than Obama not going to Bosnia and not being shot at?
The Democrats have a luxury - two strong candidates, both of whom would be a great President, and both are doing equally well in the polls.
To quote Chandler Bing, having so many fifties you can't close your wallet doesn't count as a problem.
Compare that with the Republicans, where their primaries consisted of ditching the absolutely awful until they're left with someone they all only mildly resent.
Hillary went to Bosnia but it wasn't as dramatic as she said; Obama has a priest who said some crazy things that he doesn't believe; McCain said this week that Russia should be forced out of the G8 if they don't do what America says. Two of those things have been widely reported. Care to guess which one got the free pass?
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"The last best hope is that Hillary will eventually come to see yielding as not merely the path to self-preservation, but also as her only route to long-range self-aggrandizement."
[Read the article: Why John Edwards hasn't endorsed Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ah yes ... that's what people were saying Gore should do in 2000. 'It's a close race, but you're going to lose, so quit now, even before the counting of votes has finished, and it'll strengthen your position next time'.
What could possibly go wrong?
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The Long Game
[Read the article: Why John Edwards hasn't endorsed Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The other thing ... what crazy logic has it that Hillary's going to have chances in 2008 and 2012, but this is the last chance for Obama?
If Obama ran in the 2032 election, he'd be younger then than McCain is now.
Obama, like Tony Blair, runs a real risk of disappointing in office, because everyone is projecting their own utopian vision on him. There's a cold hard reality - the government has a lot of things to spend money on, but the economy is screwed and if we leave Iraq in January we'll have to go back in in March. What we need is brutal, uncharismatic pragmatism, not someone who'll hand out unicorn stickers.
Why settle for four years with Obama, when you can have sixteen with Clinton, Clinton, Obama, Obama? Eight years with Obama as the heir apparent, keeping Hillary on her toes. Sixteen years to *really* sort out healthcare and the other big, long term, structural problems. Hillary does the work, Obama reaps the rewards. Everyone's a winner.
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'Nothing has turned me off Obama more than his blinder-wearing supporters.'
[Read the article: Why John Edwards hasn't endorsed Obama]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is ... ronpaulic, isn't it?
I suppose it's for the same reason. A lot of people engaging with the political process who, um, don't actually understand it all that well.
This is a close contest. It's not a close contest because one candidate is brilliant and the other one is lousy.
The right made up *everything* about the Clintons:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WAc6AzwDPfM
And if you think they're going to be any nicer with your guy ... last time round a genuine war hero went up against a genuine draft dodger and *they spun it so people ended up thinking their guy was the hero and the other guy was the coward*. They've already done their worst with Hillary.
And if anyone thinks that Hillary's acting all mean on Obama ... well, you wait until September and October, when his community service will be spun as communism, his wife as Hillary II (clearly this is all part of her bid to run for President in 2016 on a 'I hate all Americans' platform), forty percent of Americans have been persuaded that he's Usama Bin Laden's twin brother while also thinking he's a tool of Zionism.
The Clinton years were a nightmare period of economic boom, surplus, no war, catching and imprisoning the guys that bombed the WTC and gas at $1.10 a gallon. Never again?
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This is not a centrist postion ...
[Read the article: The John McCain "centrism" fallacy]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]http://www2.nysun.com/article/73750
Kicking Russia out of the G8. That's crazy. Crazy and impossible.
The O'Reilly trick is simple - there are 'folks', those ordinary, moderate Americans like you and me. Then there are the 'extremists'. McCain is going to be painted as 'folks'. And, fact of the matter is that at least that's *possible*, unlike any of the other Republican prospective candidates.
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100 years ...
[Read the article: McCain's century-long problem]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]What if he's right, though?
It sounds crazy, but ... there have been American troops in Germany and Japan for sixty years. There are, even now, more US troops in both Germany and Japan than in Iraq. Literally millions of Americans have served in Germany and no-one even notices or objects or worries about the expense.
And the surge in Germany is working. Compare the last sixty years with the sixty years before that.
Germany and Japan have gone from America's worst enemies to their strongest allies. They've gone from expansionist warlords to the most stable democracies. They took their neighboring countries with them.
If America can do for Iraq what it did for Germany, and for the Middle East what it did for Eastern Europe, then it would be worth it. No question, a blank check and it would still be worth it.
If America had been out of Germany by 1950, the world today would look very different.