Letters to the Editor
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THANK YOU GARY....
You have single-handedly renewed my flagging faith in Salon. You are the Barack Obama of Salon!!
You captured it perfectly.
And as for the Hillary/Barack matchup, I just LOVE this quote from Antoine de Saint-Exupery...it pretty much sums it up perfectly.
"If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."
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Your points are decently taken, but...
something worries me about Obama. He either lacked the intellectual curiosity to find out that Social Security was not in "crisis", or worse, cynically used those words to pander to the right. I don't know which, but I'll for now guess the first. He didn't think too much about really pissing off the gay community by appearing with McClurkin. He argues that his health care plan is best because it contains the one thing - lack of universality - that makes his plan hopeless.
It just keeps cropping up over and over, this tendency to not have done his homework. It worries me because with all the fawning coverage he's getting - look at it, nothing critical at all - we may be in for some serious buyers remorse come 2009.
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Is the moon in the seventh house?
Obama speaks himself of a wave that he is riding. America is prone to cycles of cynical contraction and great awakenings. Is something more happening than just one gifted speaker finding the right words? Hillary seems to have finally found a lot more courage and a little less triangulation, despite her warnings about "false hopes," and Edwards too, now the laborer's friend and why shouldn't he be?. The despair that colored the conversations of my friends seems to have grown lighter. McGovern returns to preach impeachment.
If our generation has "been waiting on the world to change," maybe the wait is over.
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The Graphics Department
. . . makes me believe that Barack has - or is - the Golden Compass. Guys. Get over yourselves.
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I hear his touch can heal as well
And flowers grow in his wake.
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"MoveOn and its ilk only came into existence in response to the destructive depredations of the Bush administration and its powerful right-wing allies."
That statement by Gary Kamiya is a pure falsehood, is it not?
"MoveOn" came into existence during the days of the impeachment of William Jefferson Clinton. The credo of the nascent MoveOn.org was to just forget about silly inconsequential things like oval office blowjobs (while discussing U.S. troop deployments in Bosnia with a member of Congress on the telephone); MoveOn wanted the country to "just move on."
So MoveOn.org did not come into existence in response to any "depredations" of the George W. Bush (43) administration. MoveOn ONLY came into existence to DEFEND the depredations of the CLINTON administration!
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Electing A Half-Black Man
I don't think I've ever seen Mr. Kamiya wax so well. The generational pull is hard at work in this election. He doesn't mention it.
I haven't seen any "mean age" figures but I've seen a lot of faces from the new generation beaming into the camera at Obamaville. That's the phenomenon. Their folks for the most part sat on their ass politically all their life and grumbled about what "went down," in their time.
As Brokaw said recently, "they were the generation with a "make love not war" bumperstiker on their VW bus who drove off into the sunset but were never seen again.
Have their children decided to participate? Is that what we are seeing? And now, what will the old folks do--appease the kids if Obama gets the nomination and actually return to the polls. That may be what it will take to elect a half-black man.
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Captured on film: Obamas magic hand beams
I thought I was hallucinating, but there they are!
He can turn water into cherry Kool-Aid
Sunshine into more sunshine
Republicans and Democrats dancing on the floor of the senate with Ted Steven's spinning Kool and the Gang's "Celebrate."
Men admiting they were wrong to their wives and girlfriends
Blackwater deployed to New Orleans with flowers for residents
Cats and dogs living together
A tearful redneck hugging a hippie
A sexy female CEO falling in love with an unemployed, skinny guy and vice versa
The CEO of Dow Chemcials bringing groceries to an unwed teenage mother
The battle of the bands--Krystal & BattleAxe--ends in a group hug
The Staff of the Weekly standard bringing meals to Aids patients
Ann Coulter's new book "The Power of Unconditional Love" reaches #3 on the NYT bestseller list.
A tearful, hilarious ending to the Iraq War not seen the end of "Mash"
Seriously, I do like the candidate, Obama. I'm voting for him or Edwards. I just carry a bucket of cold water whenever I smell smoke and hype.
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Excellent piece.
After reading the myriad other dismayingly pro-Clinton columns posted on Salon since Iowa, I've been seriously thinking of not re-upping my premium membership. But this article gives me pause (as do Stephanie Zacharek's consistently fun and thought-provoking film reviews.) It's good to see at least one writer here who's far enough removed from Clinton to see there's something happening here that could be paradigm-changing.
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HE'S A SLICK POLITICIAN
He's nothing but a slick politician who is as dangerous as George Bush was in 2000. He lies consistently and says that Hillary Clinton can't win when 50 percent says they'll vote against her, yet George Bush won both times with about 45 % of the vote.
He's dangerous -- and the media are hyping him. He's a neophyte and he unites no one. If Bloomberg gets in, that will draw some of the independent votes, and Hillary is still very electable, especially if she selects as a VP someone like Jim Webb of Virginia.
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Don't write when you're drunk
I'm sorry, but this swooning over a guy's skin color just leaves me cold. This intoxication with the passive concept of "hope" is a snare and a delusion. The election is not a subject for exercises in creative writing, but for information, analysis and perspective.
There will be euphoria enough for everyone when Bush leaves office and the Democrats gain in Congress. Save the panegyrics for next year.
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GOOD LORD
That headline and graphic were hard to take.
Peggy Noonan never waxed so loonily over Reagan.
Sheesh.
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It all sounds wonderful, but...
...but I'm old enough to remember what happened to Jimmy Carter.
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A correction
Re this from Kamiya's otherwise good piece: ". . . [Sullivan] ignores the fact that MoveOn and its ilk only came into existence in response to the destructive depredations of the Bush administration and its powerful right-wing allies." As I recall, MoveOn came into existence in response to the impeachment effort against Bill Clinton and provided a fundraising vehicle for selected Dem congressional candidates, which I supported. The ugly depredations of George Bush et al., which came much later, merely intensified the partisanship of that organization to an unfortunate extreme, which appears to have backfired. More's the pity, in my view.
Thanks.