The NYT letters to the editors were on fire today. This one took the faux-objective, ever-equivocating Kristof to task for this paragraph in his first Cheney column:
First, Democrats should wipe the smiles off their faces. This is a humiliation for the entire country, and their glee is unseemly. Moreover, the situation is not that neocons are all crooks, but that one vice-presidential aide must be presumed innocent of trying to cover up conduct that may not have been illegal in the first place.
First? That's the first thing that should happen? I swear, I'm incapable of writing about this kind of strawman-bashing equivocating without resorting to incoherent profanity so I'll defer to Mr. Don Lansner of the great state of New York, who doesn't take on Kristof in exactly the direction I'd like but gets a good start:
To the Editor:
Re "Time for the Vice President to Explain Himself" (column, Oct. 30):
In the wake of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr., Nicholas D. Kristof admonishes Democrats to "wipe the smiles off their faces."
Sorry, Mr. Kristof, but I've been walking around with a mournful scowl for five years of Clear Skies, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and W.M.D. fabrications.
It is certainly not what Mr. Kristof refers to as the "humiliation for the entire country" that makes me gleeful. That regrettable humiliation occurred before this and reached new lows at Abu Ghraib.
My smile comes from the anticipation that truths may now start to be told, and that from that, change can happen.
Thanks for continuing to take the vice president to task, but please allow us this moment. It's just the smile of hope.
Dan Lansner
New York, Oct. 30, 2005
Hear! Hear!
And, as if that weren't enough, Brierney Two gets it right between the op-editorial eyes:
To the Editor:
David Brooks got one thing right in "The Prosecutor's Diagnosis: No Cancer Found" (column, Oct. 30) - there is no cancer on this presidency.
The administration is the cancer.
Mr. Brooks's frantic attempts to portray I. Lewis Libby Jr., who was Vice President Dick Cheney's chief of staff until he resigned after being indicted on Friday, as some sort of "lone dissembler" has a highly unlikely premise.
We would have to believe that in the highest councils of the most tightly controlled White House in history there lurked a renegade, operating on his own and answering to no one. How he could have escaped detection all this time by the ceaseless truth seekers around him is a mystery for the ages.
Such is the nonsense that David Brooks would have us believe, or perhaps more likely, is desperate to believe himself. Well, Mr. Brooks, as you say, one may wish it, but that doesn't make it so.
Peter Cohen
New York, Oct. 30, 2005
The administration is the cancer. Brierney left himself wide open for that one. Oh my, Mr. Cohen, I think I'm in love.
And, because we can't talk about Brierney Two without mentioning Brierney One, (It's in their contract) here's a very patient Curtis Brown of Cambridge, Massachusettes, to school the most horribly deceitful of all the currect Op-Ed crop:
To the Editor:
In "What Fitzgerald Didn't Say" (column, Oct. 29), John Tierney writes of the indictment of I. Lewis Libby Jr. that "the cliché about the cover-up being worse than the crime is especially true when there was no crime to begin with."
Not so fast. Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the special prosecutor, told us that the cover-up amounted to throwing sand in the umpire's eyes. We don't know whether there was a "crime to begin with."
Perhaps even Mr. Fitzgerald doesn't know. Or perhaps he does know, but has been deprived of the evidence he'd need to convict by acts of perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice.
Curtis Brown
Cambridge, Mass., Oct. 29, 2005
And just when I thought my day couldn't get any better, this:
To the Editor:
Re "Inside Wal-Mart, a Larger Debate" (editorial, Oct. 28):
This is the problem in a nutshell: as a publicly traded, for-profit corporation obligated to enrich its shareholders, "Wal-Mart has no incentive to spend additional money on employee benefits."
This is why the robber barons of the 19th century crushed unions with billy clubs, and why there were child labor, sweat shops, slum wages and no worker benefits whatsoever while the wealthy lived in lavish mansions.
Health care for working Americans will succeed only if it is a universal program administered by the federal government under the control of elected representatives responsible for the welfare of the voters who elect them and not the special interests that currently run Washington. This may be a Pollyanna vision, but it is how democracies are supposed to work.
Doug Gray
White River Junction, Vt. Oct. 28, 2005
Now I know I'm in love.
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