Letters to the Editor
Scientician
Published Letters: 525 Editor's Choice: 1
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Aycharaych:
[Read the article: Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]But I seriously doubt you were a neo-con.
No, thank god for that. But the other day I was arguing against the premise that Hamas or whomever can't be written off as "too crazy to negotiate with" so as much as it's tempting to write off the neo-cons, I must attempt to negotiate with them too. All I can offer is a measure of sanity and they're reluctant to buy, but the pitch must be made. :)
Also, it would be tempting to write off ABAB for this:
You are a silly silly person, go be someone's mommy somewhere else. thank you.
but then a ray of hope in the next ABAB post:
But it IS telling that on the hand he scribbles a whole column detailing chapter and verse of some other person's evil deeds and then sort of backhands Farahkan in the same class without any attribution.
Ah, the mountain moved an inch and I am redeemed!
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AnnieW:
[Read the article: Some hateful, radical ministers -- white evangelicals -- are acceptable]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As more and more people realize they aren't conservatives, they won't continue to vote that way.
That's quite literally how it happened for me. I actually did (slowly) come to realize that I wasn't really a conservative when I looked around and saw what real conservatives were. I account the slowness due to the identity one takes on when you apply a label to yourself. It becomes painful to admit what you had believed was so wrong, and it's tempting to hold on to a few particular issues but eventually as you reexamine the evidence with new eyes, even those no longer make any sense.
I'm probably an example of the phenomenon of converts being among the most zealous of any group, but I really do see conservativism in totality as a bankrupt ideology that boils down to simple elitism and aristocracy, which is probably why the neo-cons found their home there.
I also take those self-identification surveys on Americans with a large grain of salt, as they consistenly show more people calling themselves conservatives than liberals. I expect a good measure of the conservatives were like me, and when confronted with the awful reality of what that label means, make the intellectual jump. Polling has borne this out with a precipitous drop in the number of self-identified conservatives since Katrina and Iraq. "Small government" and "strong defense" can sound good until you see what they really mean in practice.
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Aycharaych:
[Read the article: George Bush told the truth yesterday]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm not aware of a preemptive pardon ever being exercised before in the history of the Republic, are you?
Richard M. Nixon comes to mind.
Pardons is a subject which gets filed under "Things Republicans get outraged about when Democrats do it, in order to cover their own far worse transgressions of same"
That's a bit long for the old index card, so I shorten it to "Rich, Marc"
The pardon power is in dire need of a constitutional amendment. Eliminate it, reform it, make it senate confirmable I don't care, but currently it is a license to each president to order subordinates to commit crimes, then pardon them if they happen to get caught for those crimes.
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Aycharaych:
[Read the article: George Bush told the truth yesterday]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Nixon was not under indictment.
Weinberger was indicted but had not yet gone to trial when he was pardoned.
True, but I'm going to plead "distinction without difference" here and say Ford pre-empted even the possibility Nixon would be indicted which would have been a great way to refer to Nixon in future, "as indicted Republican president Richard Nixon said..."
It also pre-empted any level of formal criminal investigation into Nixon's crimes, which could have helped America avert such characters as Cheney, Rove and Fred Fielding (thought not likely since Bush was comfortable hiring several Iran contra convicts like Eliott Abrhams, so the stain of committing felonies against your nation is no bar to public service in a Republican administration it seems).
The real question is, how will we deal with the newly minted set of bad pennies who have come up with Bush? They will blossom into full on authoritarian psychopaths come the next Republican administration. There was a long time between Nixon and Bush II, there are plenty of people working for Bush who are young enough to be in their prime for 2020 or 2024.
Bush's final round of pardons in January will dwarf anything attempted by any other president in history. I'm thinking there will be blanket pardons for unnamed people who might ever come up in any investigation relating to some list of matters.
Bush will issue the first ever "class action pardon."