Sometimes, ash responds to more than one letter at once, even when they addressed entirely separate issues. It's not easy, but with practice, it can be done seamlessly, as demonstrated below:
• Krugman’s continual ranting is tiresome
I am both amazed and appalled at the opinion column Monday from Paul Krugman, columnist for The New York Times. He spent his entire three columns bashing President Bush on the past year’s events. You’d think that our country has gone to hell in a handbasket!
It must be awful to be such a conservative hater that one’s eyes only see the bad. I might add that the bad that Krugman noted about President Bush was somewhere between half-truths and lies and innuendo, with just enough truth to keep him from being treasonous. I’m also assuming that his only reading and research comes from Molly Ivins and Howard Dean. They certainly appear to have the same 100 percent liberal bias and blinders on that Krugman has.
I now know why The New York Times has trouble keeping readership, with regular writers like Krugman. This man’s articles are not done to spark debate; they are intended only to promote his extreme left-wing ideology. Luckily, his continuous ranting makes him like the person that yells wolf too often. Not many pay any attention to him, and they sure don’t believe anything he says!
The local newspaper could surely find something better to fill up its space than this trash.
• Channel hostile energy into real ideas
Many thanks to ash for making the case for the conservative talking point on the subject of defining liberals.
In the Monday edition (“Memo to the right: Liberals reclaim label”) her semiweekly offering of her flaky, cartoonish, sometimes incoherent psychobabble sprinkled with words and phrases designed to make her believe she’s more intellectual than she is only drives home the conservative point.
I have a few more broad labels she forgot to mention in her letter while she was attacking Dave Lawless. “Bush-haters” and “weak” are good descriptions for many liberals, but how about “hostile,” “sarcastic” and “irrational?”
Ms. Cormulley, if you could channel some of that hostile energy into some real ideas and actually do something in a politically active arena instead of whining in the paper twice a week maybe you could lead the way for Democrats to “reclaim” some of their lost influence.
ash's response:
Paul Krugman, a Ph.D in economics from MIT in 1977, is beloved by myriad readers for speaking truth to power. That’s one of the reasons it’s reckless if not dangerous to declare, with absolutely no supportive evidence, that he gets his opinions from non-credentialed liberals, and that “not many pay any attention to him, and…sure don’t believe anything he says!”
Generalities aside, I often wonder why the non-powerful, non-affluent, who have nothing to gain by adhering to administration policies, defend it against honest brokers like Mr. Krugman who seek to dispel convenient myths ensuring that rabble-rousing never rises to the level of outright rebellion as the comfortably remain comfortably unafflicted. Moreover, I don’t want to know what expertise with which Mr. Krugman writes is so discomforting as to rise to the level of accusations of being just this side of “treasonous.”
It’s all too familiar. Study the issue, reach a conclusion that happens to coincide with the liberal perspective, and be labelled a “conservative hater.” Cause and effect, action and reaction are deliberately or inadvertently reversed. As for the analytical component of my letters, that’s because human beings are psychological creatures. Controversies don’t spring from nowhere. They evolve from the brains of humans who naturally evaluate matters on the basis of their mindsets and life experiences, which differ tremendously from person to person. That’s why there is disagreement. That’s why there are debates.
Finally, I have no idea why anyone with basic reading skills would miscontrue my previous letter as an attack on Dave Lawless. I’m confident Mr. Lawless knows better.