Playing politics
I recently started reading the Phoenix again, but a few items bring me to wonder why. I am not quite as young as the audience the abundance of lusty ads target, not that I find them offensive, I don’t, but I do think about issues and the endorsement of Olympia Snowe for US Senate with the statement, “Her crystallizing doubts about the war in Iraq . . .” brings me up short.
Trained as a chemist, when I see nothing happening in a beaker I can often assume the components are inert, i.e., lacking in energy or motivation. Snowe’s silence on Iraq, until her 11th-hour “Bush should have accepted Rumsfeld resignation,” makes her as complicit in the monstrous rape of Iraq Bush and Rumsfeld have orchestrated as any other Republican courtesan in the Bush stable.
Letter writer Ava DeLorenzo aptly described Snowe’s “moderate Republicanism:” support of the USA PATRIOT Act, of torture advocate Alberto Gonzales, mushroom cloud spinster Condoleezza Rice, nuclear-proliferator through incompetence John Bolton, and let's not forget her votes for John Roberts and Samuel Alito to the bench. Far from “crystallizing doubts,” on illegal surveillance she parrots the Bush line, “if Al Qaeda is calling, we want to know.” Brilliant, why didn’t I think of that? It’s illegal? There are ways around that.
Next I came across Al Diamon’s screed. All the references to drugs and crack whores made me wonder where Al has been hanging out lately. With the enlightenment offered in baggies circling the toilet, numbskulls, threats of violence to his person, and drug-addled prostitutes, Al forgot to mention TABOR’s referendum requirement undermines the democratic process through empowering a minority. A good reason the alternative measure should fail as well. Nor does he call out the Howard Rich/Grover Norquist connection pushing TABOR in up to 24 other states. His vote for a flawed proposal, we’ll figure it out later, is suspect. Who will figure it out, the “lying dirtbags” of LD1 fame? The lusty ads, well, they are kind of nice to this old guy.
Steve Demetriou
Windham
