Letters to the Editor
Jeff Bowles
Published Letters: 111 Editor's Choice: 12
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Boy play. Girl play. It's very easy.
[Read the article: The superheroes of "Sex and the City"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Male superheroes have a moral code. Girl superheroes are shallow. (paraphrased from someone in this thread.)
Oh, Jesus.
You don't have to be THAT old, to remember boys playing "I'm a superhero" games at recess in elementary school and the girls playing ... well, other stuff.
(I was one of those boys. How am *I* supposed to know what they were doing?)
If you think that morality is not part of "Sex and the City", you just don't pay attention. At key points, each of the four characters has had to decide what is fair, and decent, and moral, based on their lives and "who they are". Although they share about their feelings, they face many of their challenges alone. They make mistakes, they make amends, and they live decent lives.
Yes, there's shoes. There's also some pretty nice writing and acting.
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... and I shouldn't have have giggled when I tortured puppies and kitties as a youth...
[Read the article: Bush says he regrets tone on Iraq]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric," Bush said. Pointing to phrases like "bring them on" and "dead or alive," he said that these "indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace."
If Saudi Arabia is a country of peace, and Islam is a religion of peace, then...
Sure. I'll buy it. Bush is a man of peace.
And Ghandi was a meanie, Hitler was a great painter, and Sir Winston was incompetent.
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Get therapy.
[Read the article: My whole family is alcoholic. How to protect the kids?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Are you serious?
You are playing the part of the immature, broken child who is bitter, vindictive, and judgmental, and pointing to your mother as the controlling violent evil bitch?
Get some therapy. Otherwise, there will be no one who can teach your children compassion and empathy. At this moment, you're clearly incapable of such things.
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Where was the Constitution in the dissents?
[Read the article: Supreme Court to Bush: You're not above the law]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is instructive to look at the dissents in this case.
Roberts and Scalia wrote short dissents that say, in effect, "we are at war and should not endanger the country by ruling in favor of habeas corpus."
Scalia likens the petitioners to prisoners-of-war, intimating that habeas corpus is wildly irresponsible for those captured in a battlefield. He may be a creep, but remains an articulate creep.
Roberts (et al) seem to believe that acts of the President and/or Congress are sufficient to guarantee rights, refusing to acknowledge that if the President/Congress can grant a right, they (constitutionally) have the authority to revoke it. Imagine if the First Amendment were simply a law that could be reversed by Congress (upon signing by the President. (In the late 18th century, the Sedition Act was about as close as we got to that, and it took 160 years for the Supreme Court to have an opportunity to comment on it formally, in a first-amendment case, NY times v. Sullivan. That Act was allowed to expire, and Jefferson let it be known how awful he felt such restrictions on freedom could be.)
[The "if the authority to grant a right or forbid it is given to Congress, or the President, then the other side of the coin is given also" is a notion that Saundra Day O'Connor brought up in a 1989 abortion case. If Congress could forbid a woman to have an abortion, she said, then the Constitution framework also gave the ability to force a woman to have an abortion. "Is that what you are asking for," she asked one of the anti-abortion petitioners. They turned white and probably wanted to be on another planet. Oh, we miss Ms. O'Connor.]
I do not believe that we will have an impeachment, but a long quiet period of denial in which we hope that the likes of Bush/Cheney will not happen again. For a good generation, it will not; we will have a run of Democratic Congresses and Presidents (not always) until the hotshot young Republicans in today's White House are older and worm their way into the White House again. Then we'll see it recur.
It happened with Nixon's Administration, and the students that learned at his side (Rove in college as Young Republican, Cheney and Rummy as stooges in the WH) helped create the moral cesspool that is the current Washington political environment.
I sure hope there is a Purgatory. All of us could spend a little time there, but the likes of the Washington politicians will be in Purgatory for a very, very long time.
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Who is this Cheney fellah, anyhow?
[Read the article: On energy, McCain sounds a lot like Cheney]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Why does anyone give a rat's ass what the President of the Senate thinks? He is, Constitutionally-speaking, "nobody" in the executive branch unless he's lucky enough for the President to fall off his bike and hit his head.
There is a good argument that says that the VP position ("President of the Senate") is a separation-of-branches headache and that he shouldn't even have an office in the White House. A separate coatroom, perhaps.
Authority and power, in our system of government, is like "right-of-way" on american roads: it is given, not taken. What idiots are handing over power to the President of the Senate? (Asked and answered, your honor: the idiot who (undoubtedly) fell off his bike and hit his head, as a kid.)
Is there some giant lie going on, in which the things we learned in Civics in junior high (and Government, in college) are told to us to keep us quiet, but the real system of governance is one of screwed-up power games?
I've been shown evidence of that, much of my life; I just don't want to believe that this "New World" is really just a smarmy extension of the old one.
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It's "guy love", to quote a Scrubs episode...
[Read the article: Women and their "girl crushes"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]In the New Yorker, Pauline Kael wrote (around 1975)...
Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he is--they want to be like him. And women imagine landing him.
You really don't think that Superman was just a elementary schoolboy fantasy, do you? That particular yarn has far too much lasting power to attribute it solely to comic book sales.
The John Wayne image (and its polar opposite, the James Dean image) were worshipped in their day, by men and women, and Brando was ... well, Brando. Sinatra had the women in the audience, and was cool. Brando had everyone in the audience wanting to be around him (even if he was a bit different).
Why do you think that Arnold, even to this day, is looked at as an ultra-masculine icon that men seek to emulate? He was the ultimate muscle-guy in his day, and parlayed that image into two other successful careers.
We have it, we just don't label it.