Letters to the Editor
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Crazy eyes
She looks crazy. I used to not believe it when people told me someone looked crazy, that they had crazy eyes; but then time and again it turned out to be true.
So, what's with the photo? Why choose an author photo where the author looks crazy? It's very weird.
Anyway - I'll vote for Obama if he wins the nomination, but I don't want a president who's all inspiration and ideas, I want one who's about 2/3 solid management material. I don't think he is. His grand ideas are infectious, but I fear he may just be a little too full of himself. Hopefully Michelle will keep his feet on the ground.
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@SB
I don't want a president who's all inspiration and ideas, I want one who's about 2/3 solid management material.
Then you should be thrilled with Obama, given that he's managed his campaign wonderfully, and how a candidate manages their campaign is a sneak preview of how they'd manage their administration, and Obama's done far better than Clinton or McCain in managing his campaign.
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I see the pro-Clinton, anti-Obama shills are up to their old tricks
....often anonymously. What else is new.
You guys are so predictable. Here's an article which presents several good aspects to Obama's political approach, and what do you do? Become indigant, spouting the same half-truths and outright falsehoods against Obama: he's "inexperienced," he has "no foreign policy," etc. Duh, the article outlines the man's experience and demonstrates his approach to foreign policy!
Just give it up already. Obama is an excellent presidential candidate, and you all know it. You're just pissed off because you wanted Hillary Clinton to be the nominee. Well, you may yet get your wish depending on Texas and Ohio and the superdelegates. So hold back -- no need to get all ugly and deceptive on us. No need to play games and use all the creative BS-ing you can muster to dismiss Obama. Try being a human being for a change, instead of mercenary, hack-like people who have managed to rationalize your behavior in order to believe you're somehow doing something positive when you're just being plain vanilla assholes.
Obama is a great presidential candidate. Period. Hillary Clinton is very good as well. It's a subjective thing as to who is truly better. Go look up "SUBJECTIVE" in the dictionary. That means you may have a strong opinion, but that doesn't make it true for everybody.
Get some humility.
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To jpincus
(1) Why do you object to the headline characterizing a celebrated, accomplished academic as a "whiz"? You seem overly and suspiciously hostile to this inoffensive description.
(2) You wrote: "...To call [Samantha Power] a whiz at anything means that she's both talked and executed, demonstrating that her ideas are salient in the real world." Which dictionary are you using, exactly? Since when does "whiz" mean somebody has accumulated real-world experience? You don't refrain from calling a teenage prodigy a "math whiz" just because he hasn't used engine calculus to navigate a spacecraft's course around the moon.
(3) Condoleezza Rice was an accomplished academic, or "whiz" if you will, but her area of expertise was the Cold War. She was never equipped to deal with the hornet's next of the Middle East, especially with the U.S. marching in for a poorly planned occupation. Rice also had her hands tied, like Powell, by the Bush Administration's thoughtless, willfully obtuse policy decisions. So you're comparing apples and oranges.
(4) You complain that Powers says Obama has dirt under his fingernails, then state that Powers didn't provide any real-world examples. Did you even read the article? She immediately mentions Obama's work with lower-income people in Harlem!
(5) You are so obviously in the tank for Hillary it's not even funny. Do you work for her campaign, or what? While dismissing all of Obama's experience you celebrate Clinton as somebody who has "met with heads of state." Well BFD -- she was First Lady and she met a lot of people. La di da. Then you refer to the other candidates as "actually [having] been to Iraq." Obama HAS been to Iraq. And McCain's trip to Iraq wasn't terribly impressive....he had about 1,000 of his closest secret-service buddies with him to visit a market. Once again -- la di da.
(6) "I find the whole liberal notion that we should pull out of Iraq with little long-term geopolitical thinking to be nauseating." Please provide a link to where Obama or any other prominent liberal has said we should pull out of Iraq without planning. The majority of liberals (I'm talking 90%) have agreed that to withdraw troops willy-nilly would be like pulling a knife out of a wound and letting it bleed. It's pretty obvious that Obama would exercise judgment on how it was done.
(7) Your whole take on the history of wars and Muslims makes it sound like you prefer politicians to base their war-making decisions over worries about what Muslims might say after the fact. "The Muslims...quote battles going back to 640AD," you wrote. So what? Let the extremist Muslims (not all Muslims, by the way) talk whatever shit they want to -- we can't control it anyway. Fears about future extremist-Muslim rhetoric shouldn't prevent the U.S. or other nations from doing the right thing.
(8) You wrote, "The fact is that we are stuck in Iraq until some kind of obvious and public victory is forced down the throats of the people battling against us." Niiiiice. You want to shove things down their throats. That's great. You do realize that we've already shoved many things down their throats, at times literally (see: Abu Ghraib), by now?
(9) You wrote, "There is no doubt whatsoever, if history is our guide, that withdrawal before a recognized victory is established will be a disaster for us and for the Iraqis who remain." Good thinking! Let's stay for 100 years! (I take it you're voting for John McCain.) While we're at it, let's re-invade Vietnam.
(10) You wrote, "There will be a genocide, and it will be one of Ms. Power's first ironic triumphs." Earth to jpincus: There is ALREADY a genocide. Some estimates put the number of Iraqi dead well over a million. Others are closer to 750,000. That's kinda genocidey if you ask me.