Letters to the Editor
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JSTRICK ....
didn't you see the study a while back .. that said TDS/TCR watchers were some of the most informed people out there .. and that Faux viewers were the most clueless? .. Sadly .. TDS and TCR are two of the few shows(besides Olbermann) that cut through the BS ... I just wish Olbermann would have more people like Rachel Maddow on .. and less Chuck Todd and Eugene Robinson types
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Joe Klein's conscience
Do you have anything to do with the FEC complaint against McCain that Markos and Jane Hamsher filed yesterday? If you did I say, Thank you!!
They asked me to sign on and I hadn't paid enough attention to the issue to be able to, but now I have and now they're adding my name. But it's mostly Jane as the driving force behind it, as usual for such things.
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ahoyahoy. Thanks.
Surrounded, and all lines are cut off?
The shots in mid-sentence are muffled. Fringes off ~ O whatever small points they boasted.
There came bee swarms and dark smoke, crackling fired thorns, pinky rings, and squid-suckers.
Foreskins in heaps on the floor. A hip slapper. Winners are the pro-ex=spurts. Rotten Pitchers.
The burlesque dancers chose to go for more and more killings. Oh, we will fix those holes in the bombed road?
A stone pebble dropped from a Palace Temple wall? The home shelters sometime fall down.
Hope? Hope? Hope? Hope is tomorrows door? Thank goodness the "leaders" are in charge?
Gads.
The High Commanding General David N. Petraeus. Diaspora! Weeping! Gnash teeth. O Hades.
`
Shad up.
Overrun!
A Total Depravity.
Petraeus?
You okay?
O Yessum.
Damn lies.
Murderous.
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It's pablum
People don't have the balls to stand up for opinions that are not, as you would have it, serious and responsible. They apologize. If you question one of my opinions (as opposed to responding to my points and my logic), I'll just shrug my shoulders and tell you: Life's a bitch and then you die.
Unfortunately, the land of PC speak, the land of euphemisms that parades as discourse, has lost the ability to listen to divergent opinion that may be jarringly divergent from the PC opinion. That's one of the reasons why PC never learns anything. Nobody challenges them.
By the way, the opinions that Mr. Rose appears to have trouble understanding or accepting surprise me not. This whole mess has pretty much played out as I predicted in letters to my congressmen back in 2003 when I was urging them not to allow Shrub to launch us into this illegal and unjustified war. They weren't listening. That, too, surprised me not. Unfortunately, in our society the response to being wrong isn't to pause and rethink what one has thought, it is to shout the flawed analyses all the louder while attacking any other analysis on anything other than the merits.
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Private Ownership Vs PublicTV
Ownership is a major problem but public ownership in America would become another propoganda arm under the next Bush.
By all means we should limit the ability of Murdoch to control so much message. But the death knell of broadcast TV may be the bigger enemy.
Since TV news is now supposed to show a profit(no, it wasn't always that way), news has been downsized into entertainment. Networks used to take pride in the assets they deployed in bringing the truth to the public. Now a news anchor makes more than an entire news division used to spend in covering worldwide events. But the networks are paying for faces and Q-ratings, not journalism
Maybe George Soros should start a cable news network. Would have a liberal bias? So does reality.
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@ L.W.M.
When it comes to ritual display, you know who prefers an entirely different part of his anatomy, and as we know, he always insists on anatomical correctness. On such occasions, the wise forego belittling what he has to offer, lest he show us the junkyard dog instead.
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One Effect of what went wrong
There is a documentary currently making the rounds of the Documentary Channel, called "Syria: Between Iraq and a Hard Place". That may not be an exact title quote but it is close. The documentary has lots of footage of 'ordinary' Syrians expressing their views. In it, when Bush come up as a topic, he is naturally universally reviled.
One of the TRUE intents of the Iraq invasion was that an Iraqi democracy, with its flower-lined streets and cheering multitudes with purple thumbs, was to be a disruptive form of government within the Middle East. Liberty Itself, from its new cradle in Iraq, was viewed as slowly flowing, like sweet blueberry syrup, over Iraq's borders and into the surrounding Middle Eastern dictatorships and kingdoms, breaking them apart in a wave of sunshine and flowers. I think the Neocons truly believed this, and Bush still does.
But the incredible, inconcievable misery caused by Bush both in and out of Iraq has had the opposite effect, at least as shown in this documentary. In reality, Syrian citizens seem to be of the opinion that, while they don't live in freedom, at least they don't live under Bush. They actually feel sorry for the american people. They say "Bush lied to his own people".
So instead of the sweet blueberry syrup of disruptive freedom and liberty, citizens of neighboring countries in the Middle East may be thinking something quite the opposite--"things may not be great, but let's never let what happened to those poor Iraqis happen to us".
Seriously deep and heavy conservative thinkers would likely point to this as a classic example of the "Law of Unintended Consequences". They are so fond of it--they use it constantly to strike down social programs, and the like.
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Peter Jennings Reaction
Glenn,
I actually recall viewing the exchange from which you have given the transcript. At the time of viewing, I had very, very different interpretation than the one you have given to this transcript. At the time of viewing, I believe the Peter Jennings thought he had been "pranked" possibly by the Iraqi government or maybe even another media source. The surprise wasn't that "real Iraqi's" were expressing displeasure at the bombing. The surprise was that he did not believe he was speaking to "real Iraqi's."
The issue is the content of what they said. They said, and my memory is 5 years old so perhaps unreliable, almost verbatim things that were being said by the Iraqi foreign minister, and the Iraqi "public relations minister." As I recall, these sentiments were extraordinarily close to the "official" position of the Iraqi government.
I recall believing that Peter Jennings obviously believed that he had been hoodwinked. The callers were not Iraqi "citizens," but were officials of the Iraqi administration, or worse still were actual "pranksters."
Now it is a legitimate question to ask, now, in retrospect if he was correct. Were these actually independent Iraqi citizens or was he talking to representatives of the Iraqi government? He thought the latter, but your point is that in retrospect there is every reason to believe that it was the former.
I really don't know. I do know, though, that my belief at the time was that Peter Jennings believed that the callers were representatives of the Iraqi administration or representatives of another media organization, but certainly not random Iraqi civilians. If he were mistaken in that belief it could be equally enlightening, but the interpretation of his reaction does dependent a little on whether or not he was correct.
Cheers,
dave