WeDontAlwaysAgreeButIWillAlwaysLoveTheNewYorkTimes

We Don't Always Agree But I Will Always Love The New York Times by Diane V. McLoughlin, October 24th, 2008 I learned to love the New York TImes from my Dad. He grew up in Brooklyn. We lived in Ottawa and many Sunday afternoons my Dad would treat himself by driving the family to his favorite news shop where he would get himself an illicit Cuban cigar and a reserved copy of the Sunday NYT. My sister and I usually got boxes of cracker jacks, way back when you got real prizes. He told me once that if you read the Times for four years it was equal to getting a university education. (This means I now hold the equivalent of multiple degrees.) When I went to university, I adopted Dad's highly satisfying ritual of scoring a humongous Sunday paper with magazine insert for myself, to take back to my room to devour, with relish. With the advent of electronic media we can now interact with many of our favorite publications to share our comments or concerns in an immediate way. I do, regularly. Here, I share several recent comments and also one letter to the editor I wrote to the NYT. The NYT endorsed democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama today, and made a compelling argument for their choice. My posted comment: I agree fully with the NYT editorial's assessment of McCain and Palin. I also largely agree regarding the list of fine attributes of Obama. However. NYT: 'Mr. McCain, like Mr. Bush, has only belatedly focused on Afghanistan's dangerous unraveling and the threat that neighboring Pakistan may quickly follow.' I fundamentally disagree with the NYT, and Obama, on Afghanistan. We have no business being in there. Afghanistan, like Iraq, is a resource war over oil and gas. If the NYT is worried about (nuclear-armed) Pakistan, then consider that by continuing to occupy and bomb Afghanistan, and to push our way into Pakistan and bomb there too, we rightly incur the wrath of the wronged and invite retribution. There is no point in changing the guard if the new guard is the same old thing. It is precisely because of Obama's foreign affairs policies that I did not endorse his candidacy and prefer Nader, Ron Paul or McKinney. Further, the NYT editorial implies that 'strong support' for Israel is also key. Support for what? Israel's brutal, illegal, immoral occupation of the Palestinians? Support for Israel's brutal, illegal, immoral military seige of Gaza? Support for Israel's ongoing theft of Palestinian lands, or Israel's denial of equal rights for anyone not Jewish? Just as America's bloody hubris in its resource wars causes America's security to be weakened and her civil rights whittled away, America's support for Israel's aims of a Jews-only greater Israel threatens the security of Israel and gives her no peace. While I cannot endorse Obama, I will be very hopeful should he emerge as victor and win the White House. Republican Pat Buchanan once wrote America could be a republic or an empire, but it could not survive as both; that the founding fathers were opposed to the latter for good reason. With a fresh start under new leadership let us hope for a new direction paved with a little humility and a lot of compassion (fueled with green energy.) ________________________________________________________________ Next, Floyd Norris, in his financial markets article, United Panic (24/10/08), wondered in a sidebar that France's Nicolas Sarkozy was suing over a voo doo doll likeness of himself. Norris wondered who his readers would recommend for a voo doo doll likeness for the American market. Everybody else who picked, picked people who had some working relationship with the markets: Paulson, Greenspan, and so on. But my focus is more on the political rather than on the financial side of things. Here was my comment: Who's persona to choose for Sarkozy's voo doo doll for the American market? We are spoiled for choice. I choose Republican Congressional Rep. Barbara Bachmann. Bachmann, on Chris Matthew's t.v. show Hardball, stated (as Matthews pointed out, in a continuum) that Obama held far-left socialist views, that leftists were socialists, that socialists were anti-American. Matthews appeared stunned. Did any of her colleagues hold anti-American views, he wanted to know? She responded with a recommendation that the media begin investigating to find out. I am surprised that the media appears to be so reluctant to stick it to Bachmann. A relative unknown running against her was nonplussed to discover afterward that donations began to avalanche into her campaign coffers adding up to over a million dollars; people pinning their hopes on a brighter pro-democracy future, no doubt. ___________________________________________________________________ Also in the Business section, was the posted question, should the US invest in new nuclear power plants? My answer (which did not get posted): No. Reasons? They are exorbitantly expensive, and historically state-financed because they are not competitive; they never factor in the cost of waste disposal in business plans; they are a threat to national security, the ratio of possible harm/economic benefit is too out of whack. Last, and certainly not least, is the glaringly omitted fact that the raw radioactive materials needed to fuel nuclear plants is a finite natural resource that is soon to be depleted just like all the other fossil fuels. There just isn't a lot of it lying around in the first place. All the squandered financial resources put into fighting over other people's resources, invested in more and more expensive technologies to harvest what's left deeper and deeper under ground, or invested in more obtuse, sophisticated, costly and dangerous products - i.e. nuclear - means that we rapidly have less and less time and resources to get our societies retooled going green - wind, solar, geothermal. By the time we decide to get around to doing the smart thing, we won't have the energy left to do it. The key rule to efficient models of energy production is that the more local it is, the smaller it is, the more efficient it is. __________________________________________________________________ And here is a recent letter to the editor where I complain of one-sided, biased coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. To the editor, Re: 'Symbol of Peace Stands at Divide Between Troubled Jerusalem's East and West'; NYT; Isabel Kershner; Oct. 18, '08. Deplorable. Not one, not one!, citation of abuses by Jews against Arabs. Four citations, however, of Arab violence against Jews. Three citations of how Jews live in fear and trepidation. Arabs live in fear and trepidation, too. As the Jewish hairdresser is tellingly noted for wishing, Arab communities are being razed to their foundations in the on-going deliberate, war-criminal aim of ethnically 'cleansing' the Arabs out of existence. Historical ways and means are elucidated in books such as 'The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine' by Ilan Pappe, Israeli historian and senior lecturer at Haifa University, drawing our attention to David Ben-Gurion's 'Plan D', a solution of Zionists to the Arab problem. Ring any bells? ________________________________________________________________ On my masthead I maintain the message that there is no virtue so truly great and godlike as Justice (Joseph Addison - 1713). Exercising the freedom to express our views holds the promise, as John Stewart Mill argued, that the truth will shine forth through the engagement of opposing views. I almost gave up on the New York Times after 9/11. I kept waiting for the paper to ask the question, 'why?' Why did it happen? Did the government do something, have we been wrong in our foreign policies? To me, there was nothing - at precisely the time these questions most needed to be asked. There is so much good in it, that like a family member who disappoints us, we don't always agree. But I will always love the New York Times. home