Letters to the Editor
GlennGreenwald
Published Letters: 2221 Editor's Choice: 18
-
Nick:
[Read the article: Our right-wing arbiters of masculinity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Shooting down these jokers like that is completely juvenile, and utterly required given their reprehensible actions. Boys with toy soldiers who have to take breaks when mama tells them to use their inhalers.
I admit to feeling conflicted about it. I wish I could write about more substantive things (and I actually did write a long post about Robert Kagan's Op-Ed this morning in the Post about how the glorious surge is working, but there is something wrong with Salon's system and it won't post it yet).
But you can't just leave the playing field to them unchallenged. Cultural messages like this matter, regardless of whether they ought to. And allowing them to prance around like the Warriors of Power and Courage while depicting everyone who opposes them as weak and "effeminate" (except in the case of women, in which case they are power-hungry dykes) would be a huge mistake.
I see these things much the same way as I see private morality and religion. I don't think those things ought to be relevant to political choices, but those who make them relevant by constantly injecting them into our discourse have to be subjected to the standards they espouse.
-
Paul:
[Read the article: Our right-wing arbiters of masculinity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The sad thing is, when we're referring to people who never outrgrew Jr. High, I think that actually describes many Americans. Its easy to forget how important status is during our formative years and how much of it is acheived with juvenile name calling.
Yes, these matters seem petty but they are incredibly inconsequential. Most Americans don't play close attention to political debates. For many of them, it's these cultural messages that determine their perceptions. And all the lying, the scandals, the hypocrisy, the ineptitude, etc., didn't prevent George Bush from being re-elected. Why not?
Because he is the swaggering, honest, frat boy, Strong Leader Real Guy that everyone learns to idolize in high school. And John Kerry was the delicate, effete, French loser with the domineering wife who emasculates him.
There are a lot of people who like to think they can remain "above" tactics like those, and they can: by ignoring them and remaining ineffective. That's what Kerry thought he could with all of those attacks.
Yes, it's important to focus on the substantive issues and debate the meat of issues, and I try to devote my energy to that. But you can't neglect matters like these either if you want to have any hope of having any effect. In many ways, it's in these gutters where our political conflicts are resolved. That's just reality. That doesn't mean that someone has to live in the gutter, but it does mean that what happens in the gutter can't be ignored because someone thinks they're too good to look at what's going on there.
What's really tragic though, is how this refusal to grow up actually ends up resulting in tens of thousands of fatalities, when carried to its logical conclusion.
It all seems trivial at one level but the stakes are huge.
I could not agree more. This is not about political entertainment. These themes infect our national decisions about everything. We tend to favor war advocates over those who want to avoid war because we have come to view war as evidence of the Good Attributes -- this contrived masculine courage and strength. One ignores these issues at their peril.
-
Blue Meme:
[Read the article: Our right-wing arbiters of masculinity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Right-wing homophobia is such a rich vein for exploitation.
Digby has made the point many times that one of the only Democrats in a long time to be immune from this sort of homosexualizing/feminizing assault is Bill Clinton, and ironically, the reason why that is so is likely due to his womanizing. All those scandals about all the women in the past made this depiction impossible to maintain.
-
"Success"
[Read the article: Why would any rational person listen to Robert Kagan?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]While I quite agree with your analysis of Robert Kagan's - well, let's be charitable and call it "optimistic" - WaPo opinion piece on the latest Baghdad "surge": I would be curious to know what metrics for "success" you would want to apply to the situation.
"Success" in any meaningful sense is only possible if we achieve one thing: a sustained period of stability, democracy and peace not only while we are there, but even after we leave, whereby a democratically elected Iraqi government is an ally of the U.S. And even then - as you note - what will we have accomplished that would have made the invasion even remotely worth all of the costs?
The "surge" advocates themselves were insisting that it would be months before any effects of the "surge" were visible. Now they leap on the first anecdotal evidence of decreased violence over a two-week period to insist that "surge" is working. Everything they say is dishonest.
If the implied result of the "surge" is a stabilization of the security situation in Baghdad/Iraq in general which will allow for the expedient withdrawal of US forces from the country, shouldn't we all be hoping for it's "success"?
None of this has anything to do with "hope." Obviously, I hope that whatever causes the war to end sooner rather than later happens. But Robert Kagan and George Bush aren't working towards withdrawal. They don't want to leave - ever. They want to stay. So if you think success is withdrawing our troops, we're not on the path to "success," by definition, no matter what happens in Iraq.
-
Elephantman:
[Read the article: Our right-wing arbiters of masculinity]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I noticed that Glenn Greenwald didn't link to it, apparently. It seems Greenwald wanted only to paraphrase it and lift quotes out of context.
Whenever you see a word that, rather than being black, is purple, that is what we call a "link." For instance, the very first sentence of this post beings this way: "On Thursday, The Wall St. Journal's James Taranto -- in an item he entitled "Always a Woman to Me" -- . . . ."
The words "an item" are purple, rather than black, becuase it "links" to something -- to the very item by Taranto which you falsely claim I tried to conceal by failing to link.