Letters to the Editor
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@GC!
My mother was born a James because her mother (a James) hadn't yet married her father. I'm told my great-grandfather James came from Scotland (with a brother); great-grandmother married one, who died, then the other. Would have been probably sometime before 1900; they lived primarily around central NJ and PA on the other side of the Delaware.
I heard some Jersey Devil stories as a child.
I know little else about my family, other than there's some ancestry that goes way back, and some sort of relation to Martha Washington, but I have no idea what or if it's really factual. (But Custis does, almost, ring a bell.)
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Slaughter house 5.
Vengeance is mine sayeth the ...
>"...playing gotcha."
Accountability (justice) is not the same thing as vengeance. One would end the war ('fix it') and the other simply seeks to appease the anger of the heart.
(*it was the blue pill, John Cole.)
bah.
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Of course they do
Settembrini: Everyone gets those confused.
Of course they do. Just like everyone gets 9/11 and Iraq confused; or Iran and al-Qaida confused; or Saddam and Osama confused. The reason everyone gets them confused is because everyone has been subjected to an intensive disinformation campaign. All I'm saying is that we shouldn't participate in this campaign by calling preventive war "preemptive war".
But thanks for the links — mostly solid stuff.
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I don't comment anywhere else, so again please forgive this OT
The next time anyone suggests that racism isn't a problem today in America, show them the article at my signature:
WaPo:
At Fort Hill [school in Cumberland, MD], the racial taunts had been going on throughout the school year, but the problems boiled over after a boy made racist remarks to one of Ellis's daughters in the cafeteria line this month, she said. Her daughter and the boy were suspended after an argument. In response, some students started displaying the flag on their clothes and trucks in solidarity with the boy.
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After Ellis's daughters spoke publicly about their problems at a school board meeting last week, she kept them home from school the next day, worried about their safety.
That day, the girls said, they saw two men, one with a shaved head, in front of their house taking pictures.
They called the police and their mother at work.
She told them to gather their belongings, that they were leaving. The men taking pictures, Ellis said, were "the straw that broke the camel's back."
This is not the South. This is Cumberland, MD. Similar patterns and attitudes can be found in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and other more rural areas of the rust belt. This is real.
But I have a question, for anyone who can answer, about this excerpt from the end of the article:
That evening, in front of their home, [a white school boy's] father, Keith, helped him put back the Confederate flag, which he flies from the truck along with large American and prisoner-of-war flags.
I have long noticed a certain unfortunate nexus between POW flags (the black ones with white or silver lettering) and the indicia of white racism. I've always been befuddled by this odd pairing. The description in the article confirmed, to me, that the pairing has not been coincidental. Can anyone explain it?
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more
Just look at some of these pictures. Especially the first one, of the truck.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2008/03/14/GA2008031402889.html?hpid=topnews
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DCLaw1
I have no clue. But, if Settembrini isn't along shortly, you might want to send that question to Dave Neiwert at Orcinus (http://www.dneiwert.blogspot.com/). Of all the folks I could think of who might know, Dave would be the most likely.
dneiwert@hotmail.com
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Yes, D. Neiwert is the go-to guy ... sounds like just a "logical" extension of the "cult of infinite white male resentment" to me.
bad times, hard times, often result in rising "racial tensions" (also known as racism) ..
It would be interesting to know just how bad the economy of Cumberland, Maryland is and has been for how long ...
Teens can also have their own "apolitical," even naive, cliquish imitative behavior -- god knows -- such as the Columbine shooters (apparently very superficial) fascination with Hitler... some things make mom go crazy ...
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Bush's and Cheney’s sense of morality
As usual Scott Horton has an excellent commentary on the Iraq War in his “Edmund Burke and the War in Iraq” posted today on No Comment. He quoted this by from Andrew Sullivan:
“Misreading Bush. Yes, the incompetence and arrogance were beyond anything I imagined. In 2000, my support for Bush was not deep. I thought he was an OK, unifying, moderate Republican who would be fine for a time of peace and prosperity. I was concerned—ha!—that Gore would spend too much. I was reassured by the experience and intelligence and pedigree of Cheney and Rumsfeld and Powell. Two of them had already fought and won a war in the Gulf. . . But my biggest misreading was not about competence. Wars are often marked by incompetence. It was a fatal misjudgment of Bush’s sense of morality. I had no idea he was so complacent—even glib—about the evil that good intentions can enable. I truly did not believe that Bush would use 9/11 to tear up the Geneva Conventions. When I first heard of abuses at Gitmo, I dismissed them as enemy propaganda. I certainly never believed that a conservative would embrace torture as the central thrust of an anti-terror strategy and lie about it, and scapegoat underlings for it, and give us the indelible stain of Bagram and Camp Cropper and Abu Ghraib and all the other secret torture and interrogation sites that Bush and Cheney created and oversaw. I certainly never believed that a war I supported for the sake of freedom would actually use as its central weapon the deepest antithesis of freedom—the destruction of human autonomy and dignity and will that is torture. To distort this by shredding the English language, by engaging in newspeak that I had long associated with totalitarian regimes, was a further insult. And for me, it was yet another epiphany about what American conservatism had come to mean.”
http://www.harpers.org/subjects/NoComment
It is their sense of morality and utter disregard for any human kindness that makes me switch channels whenever they pop up on my TV. Johnny Mack does not have that same sense of morality, but he allows far too many around him who do. Our nation and the world would be very foolish to elect anyone that does not fully repudiate anything and everything that Bush and Cheney stand for. They are not only the worst presidential team in history, they are also the most venal and sick destroyers of our nation’s ideals.