Letters to the Editor
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Published Letters: 156 Editor's Choice: 10
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He listens (or pretends to), but not for long
[Read the article: This just in: Bush listens]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]As with many of this administration's good news pronouncements, there is less here than meets the eye. According to the New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/06/politics/06prexy.html), our short-attention-span president allotted only 5-10 minutes for questions and comments from his august assembly of guest advisors, and apparently part of that was spent disputing with Madeleine Albright about whether he had neglected the nuclear threats posed by Iran and North Korea in his pursuit of war with Iraq. "I can do more than one thing at the time," retorted President Snippy.
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This is part of a long tradition
[Read the article: What would King have said?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Funeral orations have long been an occasion for political speech.
Remember Marc Anthony's oration at Julius Caesar's funeral in Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra?
Is this not the reason that the apartheid regime in South Africa banned funerals in the black commmunity, because they became occasions for political rallys?
Was Abraham Lincoln improperly injecting politics when he admonished his listeners at the Gettysburg battlefield to take increased devotion to the cause of the Union from the battlefield's honored dead, "that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain, that this nation shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth"?
Where does the right wing get off telling other people how to honor and memorialize their fallen leaders?
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And what about this?
[Read the article: What would King have said?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Is this political speech:
The clarity and intensity of Ronald Reagan's convictions led to speaking engagements around the country, and a new following he did not seek or expect. He often began his speeches by saying, "I'm going to talk about controversial things." And then he spoke of communist rulers as slavemasters, of a government in Washington that had far overstepped its proper limits, of a time for choosing that was drawing near.
or this:
And Ronald Reagan believed in the power of truth in the conduct of world affairs. When he saw evil camped across the horizon, he called that evil by its name. There were no doubters in the prisons and gulags, where dissidents spread the news, tapping to each other in code what the American President had dared to say. There were no doubters in the shipyards and churches and secret labor meetings, where brave men and women began to hear the creaking and rumbling of a collapsing empire. And there were no doubters among those who swung hammers at the hated wall as the first and hardest blow had been struck by President Ronald Reagan.
Those are both excerpts of George W. Bush's eulogy at the funeral of Ronald Reagan in 2004.
Or how about this:
Yes, he warned that the Soviet Union had an insatiable drive for military power and territorial expansion. But he also sensed it was being eaten away by systemic failures impossible to reform.
Yes, he did not shrink from denouncing Moscow's evil empire. But he realized that a man of goodwill might nonetheless emerge from within its dark corridors.
So the president resisted Soviet expansion and pressed down on Soviet weakness at every point until the day came when communism began to collapse beneath the combined weight of those pressures and its own failures.
That's from Margaret Thatcher's eulogy for Reagan. Is it even possible to eulogize a political leader without involving politics? Is it really the injection of politics the right-wing noise machine objects to, or is their real objection simply to the brand of the politics being injected?
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Regarding Jefferson
[Read the article: Cheney's old hunting partner fires away at "idiots"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Hey, what do you expect? Jefferson was keen on science -- you know, one of those people in the reality-based community, and therefore not to be trusted.
:-|
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What Google are you using?
[Read the article: The sixth-year swoon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I don't know what Google you're using, Peter, but Google certainly turned the word up for me: see http://www.answers.com/swivet&r=67
(Is this discussion becoming an illustration of the word?)
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Using the Geneva Conventions (in the worst sense of the word)
[Read the article: Identifying a torture icon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I had to shake my head at this statement in Tuesday's NYT article:
The Times contacted the military, which said the Geneva Conventions prevented it from commenting about the identity of anyone in a photograph.
NOW the military is concerned about the requirements of the Geneva Conventions? How quaint. How convenient.
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It's all just so much smoke
[Read the article: Scooter Libby's conspiracy theory]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]All this flapping around about what documents he has and has not been given access to wouldn't seem to me to be relevant to what he has actually been charged with, which is lying to the FBI and offering perjured testimony to the grand jury. The question in this trial is not, and never has been, whether he was the original leaker of Valerie Plame's identity. So how is it relevant whether somebody at the CIA or the State Department or the White House itself had it in for him? Nobody made him lie under oath.
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That Alternate Reality Thing
[Read the article: Whatever it is, we didn't do it]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The Iraq War was an external event? Just something that happened that the Bush administration had nothing to do with starting, and no choice about how to handle? To paraphrase Keith Olbermann from a recent "Countdown": Who do they think they're effing kidding?
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"Reportage" is indeed a word
[Read the article: Washington Post on Domenech: "We did plenty of background checks"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Ross, you, too, should avail yourself of Google. Check out http://www.answers.com/reportage&r=67
It's not even a particularly new construction. Reportage has been a part of the English language since the late 19th century.