Letters to the Editor
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Bush A Liar
James Randall is a fool if he believes what he writes. Did I believe Bush hell no He's the biggest liar of all.Randall states Bush isn't a liar--what world do you live in? the rest of the world knows that moron wouldn't know the truth if he met it in the street.
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The 2000 election
I couldn't read past page 2, where Paglia characterizes the Florida mess in 2000 thusly:
"I agree with you that the Republicans did not "steal" the 2000 presidential election from Al Gore, and that history will indeed show that the Florida controversy was preplanned and fomented by a cadre of Democratic partisans..."
No mention whatsoever of the concerted effort by Kathleen Harris and the Republican party generally to disenfranchise eligible voters, many of whom were minority and would almost certainly have cast their ballots for Gore. No mention that in the later statewide recount, Gore came out on top. Nope, it's all the Democrats' fault for making even a small stink about it.
Au contraire, Camille. I think history will show the Bush administration to have been thoroughly corrupt and venal all the way from its Florida "victory" to its suspect reelection (with Ohio's hijinks replacing Florida's) to whatever unknown fun (war with Iran?) awaits us before the cretin is out of office - assuming he ever leaves. If he doesn't, I guess then we'll get to look forward to your defense of dictatorship.
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Iraq and Roll
The thing that continuously baffles me is the fact that nobody has pointed out Bush and Co.'s self-fulfilling prophesy. They imagined Iraq as a nation filled with Al-Qaeda style extremists chomping at the bit to blow up as many Americans as possible.
And now, thanks to our infrastructure shattering blitzkrieg and ongoing military operations there, we have just that. Now understand, that I am not saying that Iraq was some sort of elysian wonderland prior to 2002. I know that it was a brutal dictatorship and that Saddam Hussein was your classic Little Hitler in the Qadafi mold. He was also a paper tiger who was willing to settle for talking up the occasional international controversy while lounging about in his oppulent palaces. With the strong dictatorship gone, the lid was off. Pandora's box had been opened and the hell on Earth that we now have there was unleashed.
The mission that the Idiot Child-Emperor envisioned was not there when we went into Iraq. It is there now. The men and women who are over there are now fighting a real enemy that our administration helped to radicalize.
In addition to radicalizing this group, our government has also enboldened them. The unifying figure of radical extemism is Osama Bin Ladin. Not in any strategic or operation sense, though I am sure the original Al-Qaeda line up would love to get back together for a very blood reunion tour, but in the sense that he is the mastermind behind the September 11 attacks and our government stopped our soldiers from apprehending him.
George Bush diverted troops and resources from the valid mission in Afghanistan so that he could play out his kinky Freudian issues in Mesopotamia by trying to "finish" Daddy's long over war.
Just as Americans have long looked to the archetypal "Joneses", they of the 4 bedroom McMansion, 100K+ income, 2.5 honor student kids etc, radical extremists can look to Osama Bin Ladin as proof that you can strike out (in quite a devastating fashion) against "The Great Satan" and get away with it.
I want to emphasize that this is not because a lack of commitment, competence or skill among our soldiers; but because of a lack of purpose, forsight or intelligence among our leaders. They wanted to get into Iraq so badly that they could not see how much easier things would have been if we rolled into Iraq with the head of Bin Ladin on a pike. Our soldiers are now paying the price for these miscalculations.
So there we have it, a nightmare in Iraq, of our government's own making. Bush told us to gear up for a long war, and his policies have helped guarantee just that. Not a long period of hostile engagement along the lines of the Cold War, but a true honest to Gods explosions and gunfire war.
We've made a mess so big, I doubt that the real solution has been presented yet.
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Suspect indeed...
A respondent upthread wrote:
"Something seems a bit suspect...
I'm inclined to believe an earlier letter writer who posited that these letters are nothing more than scripted fakes."
I am that earlier letter writer who suggested last time around that Camille writes her own letters to herself.
Honestly, the suggestion was purely tongue in cheek, but for crying out loud, where does she find these people and why do they all write in the same pompously purple Paglia prose?
I mean, the global warming skeptic guy on Gore:
"Let me now introduce you to the skewers that will likely slay the CO2 piglet running amok:"
Please!!!
But let us all take a lesson from the master herself:
"I am most appreciative of your sharply observed survey of Midland sensibility and manner. As a native of pugnaciously independent upstate New York (a cosmos away from Manhattan), I am always fascinated by the intricate subtleties of American regionalism."
Ouch. For such a self-avowed grrl of the people, she writes like tea-sipping society matron with her pinky in the air.
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The Election Thing . . .
I have long grown weary of this entire 2000 election thing. It is a moot point. We were handed Bush and have had the last 6+ years as a result. However, the off-handed manner in which Paglia has simply accepted that the Florida controversy was engineered by Democrats is flat out surreal.
Indeed, our nation seems to have a bizarre tradition of fudging the numbers when it comes to popular elections. At the very least, we have clear history of accusing and suspecting fudging of numbers and election tampering.
There is an overwhelming amount of evidence that something went very wrong in Florida in 2000 which seemed to unfairly assist GW. It is also clear that the results were hazy enough that the Supreme Court was clearly wrong not in "handing" the election to Bush, but in stopping the investigative auditing process. By stopping the recount short of several addtional districts, the court forever threw that election into doubt and question.
The court killed faith in democracy for many Americans that day. It was not a quick death either, they didn't just shoot it in the head. They poisoned it so that every Bush ineptitude, every twisted power grab, every step over the line of Executive responsibility became further proof of a corruption that sinks deep into the heart of the American process.
In 2004, it was just as bad. Mainly Ohio this time, but still reports of voter suppression throughout poor minority districts. Granted, a set percentage is almost guaranteed to have been rabble rousing but plenty of investigations have been mysterious halted and many cases seem to have been legitimate.
I'm not going to argue anymore with the results of those elections. We got the results that process allowed for. I will argue with the process. I thoroughly believe that enough questions have been raised that we need UN oversight of our elections in 2008. We don't trust banana republics with sociopaths in power to have honest elections, why should we trust a superpower with sociopaths in power.
Contact your representatives in Congress today and ask them to solicit international oversight of our electoral process. It's a shame, but it has come to this.