Read "Fight or Flight"
Great article, Mr. Talbot, but everyone continues to miss the point. The opposition to the right wing is in need of a cable television network to combat Fox, CNN, MSNBC, CNBC, NBC, CBS and ABC. We need a network with only people like Gene Lyons hosting the shows, Joe Conason, Mark Crispin Miller, Paul Begala, Robert Parry, James Carville. We need a network! Everything you wrote was true, but just getting tough is not going to do it. The corporate-controlled, Republican-influenced news media will attack relentlessly any Democrat or liberal the right wing instructs them to attack. Why can't the liberals get a cable TV new media network? What's the problem? Are they that unorganized, that all of their tough talkers are hidden on the Internet?
-- Henry Louis Murphy
Thanks for an entertaining piece. I'm no Gore guy, but you're off the mark with him. He'll return something fierce in 2004. We Republicans better get our asses to the polls.
-- W.D. Fox
David Talbot has it exactly right. The Democrats need to fight -- I'd say with James Carville-type bare knuckles because the opposition will surely do so. Nothing is more exasperating than to pick a champion who is more interested in his reputation as a gentleman than he/she is in winning. Given the right wing's penchant for mixing politics and religion, I hesitate to go biblical, but in this life the meek certainly do not inherit the earth. Maybe they do later, but by then many things we care about will be gone for good.
-- John Mihelic
I was impressed with Gore's speech in Florida last week. I hear people say Bush is unbeatable and Gore should run again if only to fall on the sword in 2004. It is nearly impossible to debate or discuss ideas in the nearly suffocating media coverage of all things Bush. The Democrats' lack of a galvanizing vision makes it appear we stand for nothing. We need a strong vision that incorporates the true ideals of care, concern and, yes, fiscal responsibility. Republicans use the term "tax and spend" liberals without qualification. Yet it has been under the Republican administrations that we have been encumbered with dangerous deficits. Democrats must clearly articulate what they believe in order to juxtapose our ideals against the Limbaugh-esque cynicism of the Cheney/Bush administration. Democrats need to be proud of their values and history forming this nation -- and quit apologizing for being progressive! Quit letting the vitriolic spewings of the right wing define what a Democrat is. Quit letting the party's internal special interests erode core objectives. Al Gore has an important role to play -- to help the Democratic Party form this vision. But if Gore runs in 2004 he will be the message. It is a new day and we need a new voice to articulate a new message.
-- Faith Wellman
Read "Sharon's War"
Don't you ever get tired of bashing Israel, whether in the guise of bashing Sharon or more directly against the State of Israel itself? I know, I know: All you do is send out the reporters and let them, or the AP wire folks, write whatever it is that they see. Next time you have a writer pen an anti-Arafat piece it will be the first one in Salon. It may be for all sorts of reasons that Salon doesn't survive, but at least you could look back and say you put out a reasoned publication and not an anti-Israel (dare I even utter the phrase "anti-Semitic" -- no, I'd better not) one.
-- Ted Tapper
What, in the name of G-d, is the matter with you people? Twenty-eight people were blown to bits while they sat down to dinner at a Passover Seder. At a Passover Seder, damn it! And de Préneuf says that the war is all Sharon's fault? Does she honestly believe that the Israelis are just going to sit around and do nothing and let people blow them up whenever they feel like it?
Arafat is getting just what he deserves. The Israelis should have run him out of Ramallah on the first day. Instead of dismantling the terrorist organizations as Oslo requires him to do, he is in cahoots with them, signing payoffs to murderers while he sheds crocodile tears about how the Israeli pressure prevents him from doing anything, as though he was just too busy with other things during the previous 18 months. And, of course, instead of calling a spade a spade, the world again sees fit to condemn the Jews when they fight back.
Well, screw you. When Arafat and his gang of murderers are either dead, in jail or on the run, there will be peace.
-- Earl Hartman
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