Letters to the Editor
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Obama in the dark on both domestic and foreign policy
To suggest that someone's background as a professor of constitutional law qualifies him to run the country is ludicrous. Obama no sooner took his seat in the U.S. Senate in 2005 than he set up his presidential exploratory committee and hit the campaign trail. He didn't even have to crack a sweat when he ran for the senate in 2004, since the state G.O.P. brought in a non-Illinois resident with little public office experience to run against him. In short, everything has been fixed for this fellow, and his lack of understanding becomes transparent every time he's asked a question not covered in the day's talking points memo or grudgingly shows up for a debate. Like a good actor, he's practiced his Kennedyesque/MLK posturing and memorized the scripts written for him. (His senior speechwriter is the brother of Fox News VP David Rhodes.) His campaign is not a "movement" but a giant Karl Rove swiftboat ad devised to sink the Democratic Party for another four years. For more on the Rove strategy, including crossover voting in the Democratic primaries ( we'll see this tomorrow in Wisconsin), and a possible "independent" ticket, I've posted an article at the cityedition.com. Click on my screen name to link to it.
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Naomi Klein
Re: "Samantha Powers is No Naomi Klein ..."
You're right. In fact, the only political endorsement I would take seriously is one from Klein.
Nobody is talking about the real deal and nobody is discussing the devastaing impact of NAFTA on the working class in the US and in Mexico. Instead the two groups are pitted against each other, but under NAFTA they are the same.
Moreover, more trade deals are pending with Peru and Chile. Do the powers that be really want the world, especially the Americas, an overlooked region, to be one big free trade slum? Do they care at all about the thousands of dead bodies in the Arizona desert thanks to NAFTA? Instead we hear about drivers licenses.
I haven't decided who I am voting for yet, but if I don't hear the candidates discuss these issues I will stay home in November.
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factcheck2
To suggest that someone's background as a professor of constitutional law qualifies him to run the country is ludicrous
Perhaps you are not aware of what has been happening with our constitution lately? I kind of miss that document as a basis of law in this country. A background in constitutional law is a recommendation to this voter's mind.
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Obama
Obama is pure Hollywood. That would be the best reason to vote for him. If he's the man, the Republicans will have many months to tear him to pieces, but somehow I see teflon on him. I mean, Hollywood, like Reagan. I'm a child of the 60s, and Kennedy was that child of youth, he was all possibilities, and here we have one more shot. Oh you democrats of Kerry, Carter, Mondale, Humphrey, and some more I've forgotten, here's a guy who can kick some ass. I mean, take a chance.
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At least Obama doesn't give the impression that he's entitled...
The more I hear Hillary's tone in what she brings to her campaign, the more I hear a tired, choked-off declaration that "I'm entitled to this, dammit."
I do NOT think she's got a special entitlement due to her stewardship as first lady, where she was a side-line personage and not a decision maker; and her background prior to that does not appear to be as able & marked as Samantha Power.
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Re: "Samantha Powers is No Naomi Klein ..."
Well , you shouldn't stay home, you should vote. John McCain would be a complete disaster in my opinion.
But you are right, none of the candidates are really talking about scrapping the trade deals and starting over with human rights being incorporated into the text of the next deal.
Samantha Powers is indeed praiseworthy but hardly the analyst that Naomi Klein is.
What it comes down to is that GATT, NAFTA and all the other 'free trade' deals must be trashed along with the WTO.
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We have experience now.
In the teaching profession, it is said that some have twenty years' experience and others have a year's experience twenty times.
We are now saddled with an administration that draws its operating model from the Nixon Era. This administration has been a disaster. Although we do learn from experience, the experience itself may be flawed. We now have a situation where compromise is doing what the boss says and loyalty is to a person rather than to a concept. The present occupant of the White House listens to intelligence reports if they "are what I want" and expects the Justice Department to be loyal to him and not to the Constitution.
This is not to say the Mrs. Clinton is not qualified to be President. I believe she is. I just think that experience is over-rated. No President has ever been elected that was experienced when he took the oath of office. The presidency itself is a learning experience. The tragedy of this administration is that rather than adapting to the vision, however flawed, that is this country, it has spent seven years trying to make the country fit its vision, which is unwise, unrealistic, and unConstitutional.
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The Crimson vs. the Cardinal: two recent cases
As a Stanford student, I always wondered if Harvard really was a better school. Leaving aside Kissinger, we can compare Condi Rice and Samantha Power as exemplars of each institution's 'best-and-brightest.'
One is patently grasping and blatantly careerist, willing to do 'whatever it takes' to climb the ladder of so-called success. Behind her apparently impressive academic accomplishments, and her skills as a musician and athlete, there is a paucity of significant intellectual accomplishment other than the sort of narrow technical work that keeps an academic career afloat but inconsequential, and an even greater paucity of basic human empathy and wisdom. She was no doubt tickled to have an oil-tanker named after her.
In the case of the East-coast specimen, we have someone whose landmark book not only won a Pulitzer, but addressed a topic of fundamental intellectual and humanitarian concern. It reached a large audience outside academia, and touched a chord with a young Senator. When faced with the prospect of taking an ill-defined job with that Senator, or working her way up the ladder of power of academia, she jumped at the chance to do the former -- a risky choice no doubt to both her career and her finances.
Now the Crimson-woman is doing pitch-perfect interviews like this one with journalists, articulating the highest ideals of the United States of America as a beacon of moral authority, interested in wielding power to do good in the world.
The Cardinal-lady, on the other hand, is bunkered in a security bubble in Washington, continuing to defend the indefensible record she and her paymaster have compiled in seven sorry years of death, destruction, and stupidity that has made America the most hated nation on the planet.
Guess I should have gone to Harvard...