Letters to the Editor
DLF
Published Letters: 252 Editor's Choice: 23
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Yes, OIL... probably...
[Read the article: The endless, meaningless blather from the Washington establishment]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Glenn writes (quite correctly):
We continue to wage one of the most absurd wars in history -- one in which all of the original justifications have long ago vanished and nobody can identify any specific purpose in staying, yet one which continues with no remote end in sight.
Note that there is a huge difference between a "justification" for war and the actual reasons for going to war. Glenn quite rightly focuses on one side of the issue, the stated justifications and public rationalizations, which he shows to be false and contradictory. But I have been struggling since the inception, or rather conception, of this war (many months before the bombing itself began) to understand its underlying reasons.
For years I resisted the "it's all about oil" explanation as too facile. But at this point that's all that's left [unless you posit that that GWB would really instigate a whole war, kills thousands and destroy a country, just to be able to blame it on the Democrats after the war inevitably fails!].
All justifications are long gone, yet the administration still insists on remaining indefinitely in Iraq--a fact that can only mean that the real point of the war is, precisely, to remain indefinitely in Iraq. And the only reason to do that is to be able to establish permanent US bases in the center of the Middle East. And the only strategic value of the Middle East, as far as anyone in the Washington elite would care, is that it contains the bulk of the world's remaining oil supplies. In the end, what other explanation could there be?
And yet... the GWB true believers (yes, there still are some, and I am on speaking terms with one of them) react to the very mention of oil in Iraq as if a skunk had just sprayed their kitchen wall. They really, truly believe every lying word coming out of DC about "spreading democracy," "fighting 'them' there so we don't have to fight 'them' here," "Islamofascism," the Iraq war as the most brilliant moment in the history of the human quest for liberty, and so on and on.
So, even though every attempt at a rational explanation of Bush's War points to "oil," there is still that asterisk, that little proviso: "assuming that there has been any rational thought behind the war at all."
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Typo
[Read the article: Douglas Schoen and Hillary's slimy pollsters]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"In September of 2004, Wesley Clark and Howard Dean led every Democratic poll"
Surely you mean September of 2003?
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Willing suspension of disbelief
[Read the article: Salon on RNN-TV]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I just got around to viewing the Videodog postings from the past few days, and in particular Michael Scherer's clips from the Mackinac GOP conference. Too late to post a comment directly on that clip, so I thought I'd add it here.
I was amazed to hear Giuliani pretend that he had never heard the phrase "willful suspension of disbelief" before, and to insinuate that it is an exampled of twisted "Clintonian" legalese. If you learned the phrase in high school or college but don't remember (or were never taught) who coined it, here you go, courtesy of Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspension_of_disbelief):
The characteristically vivid phrase and concept 'willing suspension of disbelief for the moment' was coined by the poet, literary critic and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, in the context of the creation and reading of poetry. Chapter XIV describes the preparations with Wordsworth for their revolutionary collaboration Lyrical Ballads (first edition 1798), for which Coleridge had contributed the more romantic, gothic pieces including The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Coleridge recalled:
"... it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us ..."
Very Clintonian.
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And then there's the carbon footprint
[Read the article: GE to Ohio: Turn off your light-bulb factories]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]At my house we switched over to CFL's years ago as one of the easiest way to reduce our own wasteful consumption of energy. What about the irony of having those "green" bulbs manufactured an ocean away and shipped over here, no doubt on a diesel-powered ship? Maybe the trans-Pacific shipping adds only a fraction of CO2 per bulb, but it still makes it that much less green than I'd like it to be. Obviously this is in no way the fault of "environmentalists," who would almost unanimously buy local... if only that were possible in today's marketplace.
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Another one they missed
[Read the article: Science fiction wins a Nobel ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]It is a crime that Borges was never awarded the Nobel, which he more than almost any other writer deserved (and lived long enough to get, unlike Joyce or Kafka, for example). Borges certainly would qualify as an SF writer by any standard. Meanwhile, we've also lost Vonnegut...
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LQTM
[Read the article: Opus]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Opus is almost always worth two chuckles every Sunday: one when I read the strip, a second when I read Garry Owen's futile complaints. Ok, I'm not exactly ROTFLMAO, not even LOL, just LQTM("laughing quietly to myself"), as Demetri said.
Anyway, today's Garry Owen posting--more hilarious than the strip itself--led me to a lightning flash of insight: Garry must be Berkeley Breathed himself, writing under a pseudonym! I only hope Breathed can channel this level of acid satire into his future strips.
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Why stop at legalizing telecom criminality?
[Read the article: The Beltway Establishment's contempt for the rule of law]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If Hiatt seriously believes that "acting as patriotic corporate citizens" required the telecoms to break the law, then he is clearly not going far enough when he merely calls for amnesty for their behavior. No, they should be rewarded (with special deals and no-bid contracts)... And, it goes without saying, any telecom that was so brazen as to obey the law must be punished for their "premature anti-criminality"! That's what it's come to...