Letters to the Editor
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MH re:Stripes
I'm tired of us being the bad guys. I want us to be the good guys again. I want everyone to look up to us again and to call us the greatest democracy in the world. Not for approval. But because I would rather the US helped lead the world in the direction of a thousand years of progress and enlightenment than into a great dark age filled with pain, suffering, ignorance, poverty and death.
It turns out that the blessings of our condition carry with them an implicit commandment to lead towards, and not away from, the beacon that is described in our founding document, The Declaration.
Or, barring that, to at least leave well enough alone.
We are going to have to do more.
That's the fact, JACK!!!,
Gordon Ginsberg -
@sysprog
Easy, there.
I just thought that the claim needed to be put into context, i.e. that Buckley was writing in response to a body of work that includes an explicit paen to Stalin.
Of course one can admire Eliot without being an anti-Semite, Pound or Celine without being a fascist, Michael Jackson without being LWM. But I expect that if a Republican candidate took a line from a pro-Nazi poet as his campaign slogan, he'd hear about it. Even if it were a really good line.
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@dirigo
"Shrillness replaces softness in the voice and the big stick is bigger than ever."
Maybe he's just happy to see you.
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Pol Pot
Americans "forgot" about Vietnam once the troops pulled out and the Embassy evacuation was complete and the helicopters were thrown over the sides of the carriers to drown unmourned in the South China Sea. And the Vietnamese under Uncle Ho's successors went about their business recuperating from the devastation, reuniting their own country and rescuing what survivors there were from Nixon's Death From Above campaign and the bloody reign of Pol Pot and his purists in neighboring Cambodia.
Ché Pasa
I remember in August of 1980, I was on a Thai Airlines flight from Narita to Seattle. The woman sitting on one side of me was a simultaneous interpreter for government officials, I learned a lot. The guy sitting next to me was a doctor, returning from the Cambodian-Thai border, and he was shuffling some papers and writing. I asked...he was writing what he called a "futile letter" to President Carter asking him to intervene in Cambodia on the side of the Vietnamese who had discovered the mess there. He showed me his papers: while they treated people, they gave the kids pencils and paper to play with so they would be quiet. The kids drew pictures of things they had seen and heard in and on the way out of Cambodia. I remember a page drawn by a 5 year old. The Khmer Rouge had bound a pregnant woman to a tree, and were driving a stake through her abdomen. It's been 27 years and I can still recall every pencil stroke.
The futile letter, and others like it, didn't work. Carter judged that it was still too much an open wound for the American people to support allying with the Vietnamese, even if it was the right thing to do. We did provide logistical support in the way of repositioning CIA satellites to confirm what the Vietnamese were reporting: that the rice crops had not been planted and there was a looming famine. But we were responsible, we overthrew Sihanouk. And who's to say if more had been done, not necessarily by us, but with our backing, if 10 million land mines might not have been sown.
I don't know what the moral of that was, I'm still cascading.
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Patriotism, cont'd
I didn't expect to be vindicated so quickly on my earlier post suggesting that impeachment would be much less of a problem than timid Democrats seem to think. From Eric Kleefeld:
Does the conventional wisdom that impeachment would be politically radioactive still hold true in the post-Libby commutation political world? A new poll from American Research Group shows a startling result: The people are evenly divided on impeachment proceedings against the president, and a majority favor the House beginning impeachment proceedings against Vice President Cheney.
Do you favor or oppose the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against President George W. Bush?
Favor Oppose Undecided
All Adults 45% 46% 9%
Voters 46% 44% 10%
Do you favor or oppose the US House of Representatives beginning impeachment proceedings against Vice President Dick Cheney?
Favor Oppose Undecided
All Adults 54% 40% 6%
Voters 50% 44% 6%
Among independents, 50% favor starting impeachment proceedings against President Bush, to only 30% opposed. And 51% of independents are also for starting impeachment proceedings against Dick Cheney, to 29% opposed.
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@sysprog
Now that I mention it, Eliot offers some really great campaign slogans:
1. Dubya's slogan could have been: "We are the hollow men ... headpiece full of straw."
2. Hillary: I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.
3. Romney: An election is coming. Universal peace is declared and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
4. Kucinich: Humankind cannot bear very much reality.
5. Thompson: I am an Anglo-Catholic in religion, a classicist in literature and a royalist in politics.
6. Hillary again: Footfalls echo in the memory, down the passage which we did not take, towards the door we never opened into the rose-garden.
7. Giuliani: If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?
8. McCain: There is not a more repulsive spectacle than on old man who will not forsake the world, which has already forsaken him.
9. Cheney: RESIGN! RESIGN! RESIGN!
10. Edwards: It seems to me the greatest treason to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
Don't get me started on Pound.
I'll vote for the candidate whose foreign policy is: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." Kaboom.
These fragments I have shored against my ruins, Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo's mad againe. Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata. Shantih shantih shantih ...
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Nothing is learned?
...We learned, to our surprise, perhaps to our shame, that these "backwards, uncivilized Natives" are quite capable of handling their own affairs, so long as we left them alone. And that apparently is a lesson we will have to learn over and over and over again. ...
We are the "backwards" one. A nation born in bloody genocide and slave holding that has committed mass murder over and over; and yet thinks it stands on the side of angles. How can this be? Can power blind a whole people for generations? Looks like it can.
Note: I see no place in the beatitudes where it is written; "blessed are the murderers of women and children, for they will inherit the oil kingdom."