Opinion: Mailbag: Hawks and duds

What’s the score? In your article about ‘liberal hawks’ you are STILL talking about victory and defeat, win and lose, as though Iraq and the U.S. were high-school football teams. They are not. They are places whose inhabitants’ lives -- physical and/or economic and/or moral and/or emotional and/or spiritual lives -- are endangered by this goal-less, show-off war. Shock and awe, indeed! To me, ‘win’ is a transitive verb. Win what? A medal? a nice bouquet of flowers to take home to wifey? a round of applause from everyone who stayed safe at home? As long as writers like you insist on throwing around nebulous terms like ‘victory’, there is a danger that people will believe that ‘victory’ is a goal. Then the carousel stops and we all live happily ever after? ‘Stability’ would serve us a bit better if anyone could describe, clearly, what it entails. Penelope Kuhn

You can speak of win and lose in Iraq all you want but it means little to those of us who just want the trillion dollar boondoggle to stop...The best way to stop the mess is to just do that...There was no honor going into this fiasco so why is it so important getting out...If the Iraqis want to find resolution they will...one way or the other...with or without us. Patrick G. Gardner

Tim, thanks for your great editorial about the mighty liberal hawks. Keep pinching the bloviaters. Jim Murray

Dear EditorsImagine my surprise after reading that the “Blowback Guidelines” required responses to be no more than 700 words, only to find that Ann Marie Slaughter’s response to Matt Yglesias’s column was 879 words. Now, if Slaughter had actually provided viable solutions and ideas in those 879 words, the exception to the Blowback rules would be understandable. But Slaughter does nothing of the sort; she simply repeats the same failed mantra of “bipartisanship” that got us into this war that she supported, and which results in continued bloodshed. Slaughter needs to spend some time outside of academia, and in the real world, because we are not talking about a theoretical out-of-control executive and a theoretical GOP Congressional minority that marches in lockstep with that President. We are talking about a very real crisis in this country that has cost us the lives of thousands of Americans, half a trillion dollars, and our reputation on the international stage. Slaughter wants us to believe that there are actually 11 Republican Senators that are willing to defy George W. Bush, and force his hand on Iraq policy. But Slaughter can’t name them. She lives in an academic fantasy world, rather than the very real world of domestic politics. Unfortunately, Slaughter’s fantasy world continues to create torrents of very real blood being shed by Iraqis and Americans on a daily basis. Ultimately, Slaughter is completely unable to offer anything but bland generalities about the way forward through “bipartisanship”. And its rather annoying that the Blowback rules were broken because she has an impressive resume, but offered nothing of substance despite being allow to blather on for 179 more words than the rest of us are allowed. And that’s all I have to say…and I said it in under 300 words. Cordially Paul Lukasiak Philadelphia, PA

Dear Editors,I am very dissapointed with your blowback Op-Ed piece today from Anne-Marie Slaughter. She says that we should encourage bipartisanship in Washington and then espouses Bush’s line as the only bipartisan possibility. She suggests that some suggestions fron the Iraq study group, which Bush rejected last year, have been followed. No wonder bloggers object to her ilk as supporters of the administration!! You do not help the debate when you allow Bushies to claim that they are really bipartisans. Ms Slaughter is only suggesting stay the course on steroids. Get someone who does not support Bush’s line to be your bipartisan supporter.Mike SweetValrico, Florida

Talk about striking a nerve! I was emailed your article by a neighbor. Why? Because we, a well-established, very diverse, mixed use, middle class neighborhood, an oais of single-family homes in a density-ridden Van Nuys, have been given the highly dubious honor of bieng selected as a ‘potential site’ for Valley Region Elementary School #14. What exactly does that mean? I will tell you what we have learned. We have no real recourse, LAUSD, the behemoth that it is, has no one to say NO to it. We have been literally ignored by our School Board Rep. Ms Julie Korenstein,(she has refused to come and speak with us) and the ‘working group’ meetings have stopped. ‘There is no money right now so we will not be moving forward on this project.’ Does that mean that the LAUSD will actually tell us this? Hell no, so since March 17,when my friends and neighbors received form letters that put their lives in Limbo we have no answers, no response. This has taken a quite a toll on our little village, from depression setting in on the older residents to the anger and fear of the newest on the block. Already 3000 homes and businesses in 65 neighborhoods have been cavalierly taken, lives broken, neighborhoods destroyed. There are 84 more sites to be chosen perhaps you could be next. Help us make some noise. Thanks Matt, keep it up. Sincerely,Rosemary J. SchreiberVan Nuys CA

The ‘hello, world’ cited in the article ‘Hacking the iPhone’ almost certainly is a direct descendant of an appreciably older work: Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie’s seminal 1978 book, The C Programming Language. ‘hello, world’ are the first two words printed out in the canonical smallest possible useful program, found on page 5 of that text. ‘This is the basic hurdle,’ they wrote. ‘[To] leap over it you have to be able to create the program text somewhere, compile it successfully, load it, run it, and find out where your output went.’ (Wikipedia offers more examples.) It is at once a programmer’s joke and a useful tool (though only to a programmer) because even the simple act of printing seemingly trivial output in some environments can be insanely complex.

L.A. Times: It’s a mistake to equate Rosa Brooks with journalism. She’d be better writing for those supermarket tabloids.

Will the ACLU ever achieve closure on anything? Another lawsuit to allow equal educational opportunity. There will always be one more thing needed to make underachievers achieve. Now it’s the teachers lacking? So let’s bus in the really good teachers. Always someone else’s fault. Next, you will want to borrow parents who actually encouraged kids to do their homework and get a higher education. Enough already! Mike MancusoSan Jose