Letters to the Editor
BeOfUse
Published Letters: 46 Editor's Choice: 1
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Follow the Money
[Read the article: McCain's selective defense of "traditional marriage"]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]McCain may have married money to embark on his career but had he met Charlie Keating sooner, he might currently be America's oldest, richest perhaps inelgible bachelor. I don't care if he married two monkeys who cornered the banana market and made him Zookeeper.
I DO CARE HOWEVER that everyone seems to have forgotten that McCain among others, helped Charlie Keating wreck the lives of more people than would be needed to elect him. I'm a Viet veteran, and HE IS NOT MY HERO! And breaking out the POW tapes for votes is as offensive as it is desparate. Johnny we hardly knew ya' and apparently neither did the 1st Mrs. McCain.
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Where's Archie When You Need Him
[Read the article: How to win in Iraq: Arm everybody!]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]We've been engaged in some version of nation building (it used to be covert operations) for decades. Now we just have an administration willing to gut the entire Constitution to act out its particular Neo Con fantasy without review, accountability and obvious legal consequence.
I previously wrote either in this blogspot or the Post (a fairly effective arena for thought considering THEY don't have Glenn Greenwald) about a particular Archie Bunker episode. In it, the voice of Norman Lear cut through the political crap, as we seem unable or unwilling to do today.
In the episode, Archie was addressed by a reporter in one of those (harbingers of the blog) "man on the street interviews" during which he was asked what he would do the put a stop to the "skyjacking" problem plaguing that era. Almost without hesitation, he stated ARM ALL THE PASSENGERS! So while Joan’s thought still has a ring, it’s far from original.
Now we have a Democratic Congress which, when scrutinized from any angle, is an abject failure at the ONE THING it was tasked to do in the last election. Our elected officials have habituated their “peace-at-any-cost”, co-dependant, do anything/nothing, risk-free behavior to get RE-ELECTED for so long, that now the moment is here, they are paralyzed. It’s not lonely at the TOP, but it is lonely OUT FRONT!
It seems my Democrat brethren have grown accustomed to the seductive ease and comfort of being the underdog. "Did you exchange a walk-on part in the war for a lead role in a cage"? FOR SHAME! Has the moral muscle and political passion so atrophied in the Democratic Party, that in this moment they DARE NOT ACT?
CONTEMPT - both from and for this President and presidency - is the most likely term that History will apply to the legacy of the Boy King. The ONLY thing that could prevent that is if this Congress cannot break the chains of self-interest in order to enact the will of the people. This would place our elected officials BEYOND CONTEMPT, and so by comparison, this dismal excuse for a chief executive would appear tolerable. Maybe the polls ARE right on this one.
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Minor Leaguers Can't Hit a "Curveball"
[Read the article: Bush knew Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Congress is still playing minor league ball. This business of Bush lying America into war has been unraveled about a 100 times. Almost all persons who can write and think at the same time have been exposing this corrupt war by a corrupt administration from the outset: Against All Enemies, A Pretext for War, Hubris, State of War, The One Percent Doctrine, The Greatest Story Ever Sold, State of Denial, Plan of Attack, among of course, many others.
That quote by one of Tenet's deputies, "You haven’t figured this out yet. This isn't about intelligence. It's about regime change”, rings of accidental truth. In "NeoConSpeak" it means it YOU can't run it, WE WILL! More to the point, since the very day the Boy King arrived in office, nothing has embodied or even hinted at intelligence, by any definition of the word.
Of course he lied! He’s a myth driven, arrested adolescent who masks his inadequacy with bravado, his cluelessness with iron-fisted certitude, and ultimately feigns a macho, range-war toughness he simply has never earned while at prep school, in the Ivy League or during his perilous, photo-op National Guard stint. He’s a fraud – period!
There are two (2) things - kind of "then and now" bookends - that absolutely defy reconciliation with the facts that are KNOWN:
1. Given Rumsfeld’s contemptuous opinion and degrading treatment of our highest-ranking military officers, it is unimaginable that NO ONE at Defense ever pulled General Powell aside and warned the great American soldier and statesman that he was getting “played” every step of the way by his boss and by his so-called “colleagues”. Nor could anyone with Powell’s savvy, access and day-to-day insider presence, not hear of Cheney’s unprecedented, incessant appearances at the CIA, executing what was to all our shame, a successful strategy to spin the intelligence data, cook the books and sell the war.
2. Since the GREAT WMD LIE was served to, swallowed down and digested by a fear-frozen, post 9/11 electorate, there has not been another PEEP about the continued search for or even accidental unearthing of any actual WMD evidence. Stuff has been blowing up over there for 4 ½ years. Where are the protective masks now? No one has seen one canister of any kind of gas? Not one shred of evidence, metallic or chemical – no papers abandoned in haste by this evildoer and his cadre for whom we forsook Ben Laden? PLEEEEEZZZZ!
Time for Congress to come to the plate and refuse to step out on that curveball. It’s the only pitch Bush has ever thrown – clever but not smart, manipulative but not strong. The truism that getting hit by a curveball does not end a major league career can only learned by experience of being hit and surviving. The lack of will to stay in the box, risk getting hit and take your cuts simply means that you will be SOMETIMES safer, but ALWAYS be a minor leaguer.