[Peace-discuss] letter to The Paper

[C. G. Estabrook]

An excellent reply to an offensive column, Ricky.  Amidst his prurience
and fantasies about "the Left," Metz makes two good if obvious points:

	(1) the fecklessness of the Democrats (a point better made -- or
assumed -- in a self-indulgent column by the editor on the nest page,
which at least contains one good story [not the one about Edgar]); and

	(2) the similarity of the Kennedy and Bush tax cuts.  Of course
the differences are also instructive, and Metz leaves out the crucial
middle term -- the Reagan tax cut, where the current gang learnt the art.
Give to the rich, take from the poor, and run up the deficit so that it's
"fiscally irresponsible"to spend money on anything that might actually
help people, as Reagan's budget director David Stockman admitted.

So American working people would look longingly on the situation of their
European counterparts, if they were ever told about it.  Instead, they're
whipsawn between jingoism and fear, conditioned by "security" and the
"we're-number-one," "greatest-country-in-the-world" pap that the pro-war
party on Prospect imbibed.  Leo Strauss would be proud.

  ==============================================================
  C. G. Estabrook, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar
  University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign [MC-190]
  109 Observatory, 901 South Mathews Avenue, Urbana IL 61801 USA
  office: 217.244.4105 mobile: 217.369.5471 home: 217.359.9466   
  <www.carlforcongress.org>
  ===============================================================


On Fri, 16 May 2003, Ricky Baldwin wrote:

> [Folks, I picked up a copy of the latest issue yesterday, and was so
> unexpectedly pissed off by Dan Metz's column on page 3 that I wrote
> this.  I'll send it this evening unless anyone wants to offer
> constructive criticisms...]
> 
> Dear Editor:
> 
> In-between the name-calling, Dan Metz did manage some real irony in
> his column (5/16) on the “President who says what he means, means what
> he says,” etc.  Aside from the naïve assumption that Bush is in
> charge, the claim that the Administration is truthful is either a
> cruel joke or willfully ignorant.
> 
> Maybe Metz hasn’t heard that the US 75th Exploitation Task Force (the
> guys looking for Rumsfeld’s “weapons of mass destruction”) are giving
> up and going home.  Maybe he missed the fact that the UN inspectors
> found nothing either, or that Washington’s star witness/defector Iraqi
> Gen. Hussein Kamel, paraded as proof of the weapons’ existence, went
> on to say that the weapons had been destroyed.
> 
> By now it should be painfully obvious to anyone paying attention that
> when this Administration announces, “We have evidence...” that their
> “convictions” are showing.
> 
> Again ironically, Metz mocks the “losers” and “whiners” concerned
> about the Supreme Court’s unprecedented selection of George W. Bush
> over the candidate with the most votes.  Then he devotes nearly a
> third of his column to “whining” about Miquel Estrada’s failure to zip
> past the democratic process and onto the federal bench.  Maybe the
> Republicans should appeal this failure to the Supreme Court, too.
> 
> Of course, if “Judge Estrada might actually consider the US
> Constitution a document to be paid attention to,” as Metz says, it
> could mean trouble for the Administration’s anti-Constitutional agenda
> of PATRIOT Acts I and II, military tribunals, and the rest.
> 
> [P.S. BTW, it was only with supreme effort that I resisted the urge to
> quote The Bush Dyslexicon at length, but I sure wouldn't mind seeing
> others do it, or something similar ;-)]
> 
> __________________________________