Letters to the Editor
Geogre
Published Letters: 81 Editor's Choice: 6
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The Most UnAmerican Stance of All
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I have known quite a few Russian emigrees. They told me, of some other Russian, "He's not a Russian: he's a Jew." I know Chinese who have the same view. I know Africans with the same. Their idea is that nationality and ethnicity are identical. It is an ugly philosophy that, I had always been proud to say, we Americans do not understand.
The child of an illegal immigrant is as fully American as I am. My ancestors came over to Virginia in the 1630's, and yet I do not gather any claims of "real" America from their decision to try to get rich by planting thousands of acres and working them with slaves. The U.S. was founded as the first entirely political nation-state.
The Know Nothing Party was an hideous aberration, and anyone who channels economic fear to ride such demagoguery deserves to be tarred and feathered. This is a nation that only exists by having no nativism. The moment it devolves into ethnicity is the moment it fails entirely.
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Oh, the Confederate thing...
[Read the article: High standards at the Washington Post Op-Ed page]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Dividing up like that is not helpful. The South has led the way in both integration and segregation, in both liberalism and conservativism. Bringing that up, especially in any triumphalist note about one's own wonderful Union ancestors, is doing exactly the same thing: it's playing nativism. Get over it, please.
Saying, "My ancestors wanted to free the slaves" is silly -- as silly as saying, "My ancestors got here first." Blaming Americans of one place for their ancestors is the flip side of praising another for theirs. It's stupid, and it shows precisely the same desire to claim some "real" status from birth.
We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and embued by their creator with the same rights. Don't fight a nativist talking up West Virginia's televised rednecks by trying to point at your own, or that person's, ancestors. The truth is that ancestry never imparts virtues or vices to the present generation, and the "I hear he's Muslim" voter's ancestors were probably in Europe before 1900, just as the "I hate those rednecks, because my ancestors were enlightened" crowd's ancestors may have been in the anti-emancipation riots.
No one inherits value in a democracy.
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Oh, Lord, save us!
[Read the article: White House denies Iran story]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]She didn't deny anything. Alex, she didn't deny the facts, the conclusions, or the reporting. She said that unnamed sources are bad. That's not the same thing as denying that a high white house source (and "high" is the best explanation for the words) said that the Prednisent plans to "attack" before going.
Here we go round the mulberry bush.
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Bush's "Brain"
[Read the article: News from Israel: Bush wants to attack Iran soon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]If there is anything more difficult than assessing Israeli motivations and plans from the outside, it would be assessing Bush's sense of reality and plans. Israeli politics are extraordinarily divided and difficult for outsiders to speak about coherently. In a sense, there isn't an "Israeli" position on very many issues.
However, Bush is difficult for a very different reason. To my knowledge, none of the authors who have written otherwise compelling accounts of the invasion of Iraq have been able to exactly figure out why that particular country was Bush's "Carthago delenda est". Woodward says it's a Daddy thing, others don't even bother to speculate. If we, in retrospect and after six years, cannot figure out why Bush's team was that deluded, that insistent, and that ready to flaunt the will of the world and the American people, then there is no reason for taking a strongly skeptical or credulous position on Bush and Iran.
Will he throw missiles on his way out the door? Will he not? Will he be more likely to do so if he knows that a Democratic president is coming in (a genuine scorched earth) than a Republican (whom he will presume to follow up on his own)?
They say that the worst thing for international relations and international commerce alike is instability. Well, having a president (or "prednisent," as he would say it) this erratic and unpredictable is bad for all of us everywhere.
Is the JP article legitimate? Are there reasons to misinform? Who the heck knows? That, in the end, is the most terrifying prospect.
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Best counter attack ever!
[Read the article: San Francisco values]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I am thrilled, absolutely, with the responses of Obama to these sorts of attacks, and I'm delighted to see them mirrored on the Congressional level. The only way to win in an ad hominem is to stay on your topic. After all, the real purpose of an insult is not to make you cry or run away, but to change the argument from the issues to the person.
This particular attack is old. Again and again, I see tactics that seem to have come first from Jesse Helms's cauldron. In 1990, North Carolinians were treated to discourses about "North Carolina values" vs. the opponent who "got donations from San Fransisco" and had "libral" values. In South Carolina, the same language was used. In Georgia, Max Cleland was defeated not only by the hideous "Cleland/bin Laden" morph ad, but, much, much, much more effectively by a chorus of "Georgia values" vs. "Washington values." Cleland's effectiveness in Congress and his centrality to the Democratic Party's message was used to say that he was not a Georgian.
No one can win an argument along those lines. It is impossible. The choices have been to either not answer or to try to "out local" the other guy" or, in the old days, to show how the other guy has corporate values. The new tactic, not of shaming the Republicans, but of pointing at their very ads with a sense of disgust and ridicule, may work. It gives the viewer the message that "sane people think this is stupid," and in that way it compliments them.
Now, where did I put my pink bowler hat and my plastic chaps?