Letters to the Editor
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Bush Knew!
As for your point about a jet from the NE taking two hours to reach Miami, it was not known at the time that all the hijackings had taken place in the NE.
-- Aycharaych
"Was not Known"? I thought your whole point for showing up here was to tell us...Bush Knew!
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Just for fun....
Compare and contrast
http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDU5ZDI3YzI3ZDhiZDBlMGY3Yzg0ZTk4MWNjZDJkMDE=
The Arab tendency to lie and exaggerate about enemies
http://www.time-blog.com/swampland/2007/12/today_in_iraq_18.html
It is woven into the fabric of a tribal society.......the single most powerful reason why democracy simply hasn't worked among Arab tribal countries
K-Lo and Joe Klein
Birds of a feather.
Who Knew?!
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birds of a feather? parakeets and caged parrots...
crapping on a "news" bottom paper. Peacocks have ugly feet.
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@Kitt
Let me revise my statement a bit then for Captain Nitpick..
It was not *supposed* to be known that all the hijackings were in the NE.
Frankly, I have no idea of who knew what, but the evidence does suggest that there was some advance knowledge on the part of someone in the administration..
Do you have another reasonable explanation for why the SS did not hustle the current resident from the the Booker elementary school?
If *you* were in charge of the SS detail that morning, what would you have considered to be the prudent course of action to be followed?
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@ Ron Pauliac
Apparently reading for comprehension is not your strong suit.
I wrote that the sites to which the brave Anonymous linked did not exist before my developing the theory which I related.
How you managed to confabulate that into "there were no conspiracist websites before 9/11/2001" I have no idea.
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Ché Pasa on standard-setting
So how is it these minor comptes and comptesses have so much sway over their -- ahem -- "colleagues?" ... Does no one have any critical faculties any more? Has the 'Reagan Revolution' been so successful that no one under the age of 45 can even imagine the concept of critical thinking?
To be fair, people who are in their 40s and 50s now were in their twenties and thirties in the 1980s — they were the Reagan Revolution, to a large extent. So let's not fall all over ourselves to give folks of that cohort a pass.
But in a larger sense, the answer to the question Ché Pasa poses is essential to the full recovery of American liberalism. How did educated, intelligent people in this country end up in thrall to the right wing master-narrative of history?
Is it as simple, as some people suggest, as a reaction against the Vietnam-era counterculture and the excesses of the New Left? Do liberals today just reflexively reject any radical critique of power as a way of scorning their parents' generation?
Or is there something deeper at work, something to do with fear of instability and aversion to responsibility for change — a need to cling to any understanding of politics by which everything may be seen to be alright?
Avoiding those questions dooms American liberals to repeating the same sorry history. (Or I suppose we could just die off and let the kids clean up after us — they don't seem to have the same trouble grasping the truth. But "eventually they did all die" hardly seems like a legacy to strive for as a generation.)
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@bout Ron Pauliac
The "iac" in Ron Pauliac's handle suggests to me that he has a propensity to call out maniacal thinking when he encouners in. (I happen to know that his "other" handle also ends the same way.)
He is therefore unconcerned about the details cited in your links. The fact that people who insist on following the "Bush knew" idea do us a disservice by marginalizing and allowing ridicule to fall on those of us who are members of the "Bush should have known but forcfully chose to ignore the evidence" camp.
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@SusanMc
Where did Glenn say the NRO scandal is "worse" than Beauchamp, other than detailing that Greater Wingnuttia and Lopez' responses (and non-responses) are "worse" because they are completely hypocritical? I think you've missed his point.
Well, in the subhead that I've quoted a few times here, for one thing:
The leading conservative journal is caught in a far more serious scandal than the TNR/Beauchamp controversy that it helped fuel.
That seems, to me, to support my thesis. Perhaps it was my imprecise use of "worse"? I meant it in the sense of "more important to worry about than". Does that work for you?
You seem to find both Glenn's and Foer's explanations too long and difficult to wade through-- so maybe it's you?
I'm sure it's at least partly me, but nonetheless I had no difficulties "wading through" either one - they're both pretty quick and easy reads, and I think I grasped the main points of each fairly well. That doesn't mean I don't think that the one could have been written more persuasively and the other less defensively.
"Transparent" does not mean "short and sweet." And if all you've really meant to do is disagree with the use of one word, "impressive," I believe you've slaughtered the lede.
Well, now we're going down the definition rathole - and I hate it, but don't know how to avoid it. I pull out my dictionary.com and say "Look at meaning number 6! 'open, frank, candid!'" And then you say "But that's just one dictionary, and it's all the way down at number 6! Maybe Glenn meant 'easily seen through'; you certainly feel like you easily saw through Foer, right?" And then we're arguing about whether calling something "transparent" has a technical truth value of greater than zero - and I think they call that a semantic dispute.
Which really doesn't help either of us convince the other that calling Foer's actions "impressively transparent" was either the right or the wrong choice of words (or even topics).
Which really doesn't help ANY of us argue the point that Thomas Smith was a bad, bad author with a bad, bad editor.
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Say what?
How did educated, intelligent people in this country end up in thrall to the right wing master-narrative of history? -- amity
Did they? It seems to me that as convenient assertions go, this is possibly the most convenient of all. It's as much a rhetorical cheap trick in its own way as Intelligent Design is. Creation is terribly complex, therefore it didn't just happen by itself. Right-wing political power is currently in the ascendancy; therefore liberals must have been either hoodwinked or converted.
Nope. What you have is a neat master narrative for the sake of making arguments, but one which is far too neat to resolve them. Further study is needed if you want a theory which more closely approximates what actually happened, and if you then want to describe it fully, you'll need more space than a blog comment section generally provides.