Letters to the Editor
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Snooty Liberals
Kirby - You're obviously very sensitive to rejection . I hope you're a white heterosexual Christian, can spend hours watching cars go round a track, think killing animals is fun, talk a lot about pussy and are generally suspicious of anyone who says anything that hasn't been heard by everyone a thousand times before. If not, you're probably in for more disappointment.
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"Look, the educational system in the U.S. is broken. "
What's broken? the facilities? the teachers? the funding? Washington DC has the highest-funded schools in the nation, and North Dakota the least. Yet their public school system have an inverse ranking in terms of SAT scores. So, what's broken?
What's broken, and what affluent white liberals are fleeing, is the feral low IQ students in those schools. No amount of money, no battalion of Americorps volunteers will fix that.
Now, I don't blame affluent liberals (and conservatives) who flee such schools. What I deplore is that these same affluent liberals (and conservatives) deny poor and middle class whites the opportunity to educate their children with other white children of the same class. The perfect example is the Boston judge who ordered busing to integrate poor Irish and blacks schools, and then immediately pulled his daughters from public schools and enrolled them in a tony private school.
As someone noted ealier, there is nothing wrong with racism. It's as natural and normal. Asians, Mestizos, blacks, everyone, you name it, is racist. What's unnatural is that it's become a kind of fetish among certain whites to carry on (and it's all talk, no walk) like they've overcome that primal impulse to prefer the company of people like themselves.
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Spurious Logic
"it clearly seems that the speaker is much more worried or considers Bush to be a much more clear and pressing danger to the values that they hold dear than, say, a Saddam or a bin Laden."
This is a ridiculous bit of logic that is easily punctured.
Bin Laden is a terrorist; I do not expect that he share my values or respect my rights. He is not American, we did not elect him, he does not claim to represent me. I expect more from the President of the United States.
Expounding upon the evil of Bin Laden helps nothing. Expounding at length upon the failures of the Bush Administration is a way for us to express displeasure with OUR leader and suggest a different way ahead. It is at the heart of the Democratic process.
There's a good metaphor in here somewhere, but I'm out of time and it hasn't come to me.
-S
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D'Souza, historical ignoramus.
The Shah did indeed have something to do with the rise of fundamentalist Islam in Iran.Just not at all in the way D'Souza presents (if you want to call that psuedobabble a presention).
After years of the Shah's version of Bushonomics, Iran's middle-class was in shambles. Historically when there are no avenues for bright people to achieve material success, religious fundamentalism near always has risen to popularity.
In Iran and Iraq and increasingly Saudi Arabia it happens to be Islamic fundamentalism. As Reagan, Bush I and Bush II (and their allies on the courts and in Congress) have destroyed the American middle class, fundamentalist Protestantism has risen.
There's your reality.
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Puritans together
This is what it takes to get a position in a top-level right-wing think tank these days? The idea that a xenophobic, sex-obsessed puritain like Sayyid Qutb could ever be persuaded to accept the United States, either as a liberal country or a dominionist Christian theocracy, is a hoot. But the suggestion that this fantasy shows the 9/11 attacks are actually the fault of liberals is far worse. I thought the right was dead-set against giving terrorists what they want-- to the point that any progress on the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is impossible so long as some Palestinians are committing terrorist acts. But now Mr. D'Souza seems to be proposing that we adopt the theocrat's agenda to appease al Qaida? Somehow I think any liberal who made a similar proposal would be pilloried for it...with D'Souza leading the pack!
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I'm extremely liberal and I'm a lower middle class white male living in the deep South
I'm also a long term confirmed atheist and I wouldn't vote Republican if you paid me.
I live in a mixed neighborhood, we have some whites, some blacks, a few latinos and a couple of middle easterners. Everyone gets along fine. The only problem I've had with a neighbor in the last fifteen years is a white trash woman who lets her dogs run free to terrorize other people's animals and tear up their yards.
If you want to live like a Republican, you have to vote Democratic.
Harry Truman
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Jonathan
Why do you call yourself a white male?
Can't you call yourself a white man?
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Democraps Have ALWAYS been RACIST PIGS
All those lynchings in the 20th century? Done by DEMOCRAPS.
All those Jim Crow laws? Written by DEMOCRAPS.
Lincoln, who set the slaves free? REPUBLICAN!
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Discussion and Debate
I guess these articles detailing what right-wing jerks are thinking are good for discussion, but really---any thinking, compassionate, and caring person knows that right-wingers are sub-human, so who really cares what they think? I know what they think. It doesn't advance humanity one bit, and thinking caring people already know what they think. I guess it gives us all a chance to develop opposing arguments, but...I don't know. I'm tired of all of 'em, including Dinesh. What a waste of human flesh.
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He's so yesterday
When Dinesh D'Sousa plagiarizes five-year-old rhetoric from Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, you know he's running on empty. A few years ago he was a bright, outrageous young campus Republican, amusing himself and delighting his conservative sponsors by taking easy pot-shots at the "establishment" mentality of his college professors. Now he's indistinguishable from a middle-aged hippie of the 60's pathetically trying to recapture his lost youthful verve by going after the same old targets and trying to be even more outrageous about it.
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A little over the top there, Alex
"Dinesh D'Souza has been a prominent force in the conservative intelligentsia..."
Right up there with Michael Savage and Ann Coulter.
I don't think the Left has too much to worry about if "Denise" is the Right's heavy artillery.
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Intellectual Honesty
Thanks to Alex Koppelman for his razor-sharp interview and analysis of D'Souza's screed attributing the homicidal hostility of Wahabi Islam to America's liberal cultural depredations. Any chance that D'Souza might have had after Koppelman finished with him was promptly extinguished by the coup'd grace collectively administered by MustangBobby,ffish,Username, EndofNothing and Goldenboy. The little that remains of D’Souza can be cleaned up with a snow shovel and a garden hose.
Wishful thinking! While Koppelman and Salon in general perform a valid service by reviewing and encouraging discussion of hate speech in all its forms and from whatever the source, the problem could be much larger and more dangerous than any of us are willing to come to terms with. It is clear that most Salonistas are sophisticated enough to recognize hate when it appears in print. Sadly, this ability is not as widespread as any of us would prefer. Nor is the courage required to confront hate when it is encountered. What very few seem to recognize is just how evil and powerful sloppy reasoning and transparent propaganda can be.
My recent reading of Niall Ferguson's
The War of the World has dramatically changed the way I interpret much of the written and verbal attack speech that comes from the right wing media. Much of Ferguson's scholarship focuses on the social, economic and cultural environment throughout Europe, as he sees it relating to the state of war that effectively sustained itself from 1904 to 1953. He examines at length how European and particularly German Jews were approaching the point of comfortable integration into the Christian/secular cultures with all signs pointing to eventual assimilation. He discusses the rapidly growing rates of inter-marriage, the economic integration and the geographic dispersion of the Jewish population in Western Europe. Not that anti-Semitism was itself in danger of extinction, but it was apparently not a particularly strong or widely held prejudice in early 20th century Western Europe. That is until a nihilistic ideologue decided to exploit the power of hate to fuel his political ambitions.
The propaganda techniques by which European Jews were transformed from neighbors, shop-keepers and valued members of the professional class into subversive genetically inferior dangerous sub-human candidates for extermination are explained in some detail within the 654 pages of Ferguson's book. The same techniques are evident in right-wing media in this country today! I found myself recognizing just how comfortable Michael Savage and Ann Coulter would be broadcasting for the Nazi’s. All you have to do is change a few words and a couple of names. Substitute the word “liberal” for “Jew” and you are ready to start building the new crematoria. The somewhat less violent sentiments that characterize O'Reilly, Hannity, Limbaugh, D’Souza and their ilk serve primarily as a transition to the stronger calls to action offered by the goose-steppers. Are all of these people conscious participants in a looming genocide? Of course not. The danger lies in the possibility that a few of them might be. Many of them just know an easy buck when they see it. As Germany demonstrated in the 1920's and 30's, it works just as well either way.
Let me conclude with a few words for Grumpy Optimist. As a faithful alumnus of Stanford, it is incumbent upon you to organize your fellow alumni, in the name of Intellectual Honesty, to evict the Hoover Institute from your beloved campus. The university obviously has made a decision in favor of right-wing financial support at one level or another by providing an address for this tenant and the academic fraud they perpetrate. Tell us about your activism in defense of Stanford’s “Intellectual Honesty.” Let us know what we can do to help. Maybe this could grow into a liberal “K Street Project”. Just as Karl Rove and Grover Norquist drove democratic lobbyists out of Washington, maybe we could drive these right-wing pseudo think-tanks out of at least the legitimate university campuses. The concept of Intellectual Honesty is the Achilles heel of this entire think-tank phenomenon.