The good folks at the Future of Freedom Foundation kindly forwarded to me some of the lively responses they received after sending out my op-ed, “Are Presidents Entitled to Kill Foreigners?”
I’m not certain, but I’m pretty sure all these editors decided not to publish the article.
Here’s a response from Bob Weir, the executive editor of the News Connection (Texas):
Were we right to kill “foreigners” in other wars? Were the Germans, Italians and Japanese not foreigners? Adhering to your definition, the only wars we’d be able to engage in would be civil wars. By the way, do you have anything good to say about the United States? Your support of Iran, a dictatorship that has been proven to be responsible for the deaths of countless American soldiers, tells me all I need to know about your hatred of your own country.
I will never understand people like you who live the American lifestyle with all its bounty, while taking every opportunity to trash it. If you have so much affection for Iran and its ayatollah-style government, why do you stay here? Could it be because you have freedom here? Could it be because if you lived in that tyrannical state and opened your mouth against the government you’d be stoned to death in the public square? You’re like the spoiled brat who has all the comforts of life, yet hates the parents who provide it for him. Sadly, your parents must have done a lousy job of raising you because you bear all the signs of a child that was never taught to appreciate his good fortune. ****
The Guthrie Center Newspapers sent an indignant one line response to the piece:
It’s not Bush — it’ President Bush, just like President Clinton, President
Bush, President Reagan, President Carter, etc.
Well, maybe that’s why Mr. Editor didn’t like the piece. (That particular email did not include a name). *****
The Addison Eagle News and Reporter in Middlebury, Vermont, replied:
What a stupid, naive premise here. Presidents don’t kill foreigners (unless
they are secret agents although I never heard of one stalking a foreigner
and shooting them.)
The real question you should really care about as an American citizen
is: Should foreigners be entitled to kill Americans? Thankfully we have a
President who doesn’t think so, after 9/11.*****
If George W. is ever indicted for war crimes, he should certainly try to stack the jury with editors from this paper.
Bill Johnston, the editor of the Collinsville News, also successfully resisted the article’s allure:
Didn’t have to read very far in your “op-ed” to know that you obviously
don’t have a clue as to what you’re talking about….
“Seems to be the attitude” . . . what a comment. You don’t have a clue what
the attitude of President Bush and his advisors is or ever will be.
Needless to say, your ridiculous effort at some sort of anti-Bush rhetoric
will never see the light of print in this publication and I am hopeful in
very few other newspapers around this country….
By the way, if you’ve got evidence of President Bush breaking the law, file
the proper motion in court….
My hunch is that Bill Johnston has not spent a lot of time reading about the State Secrets doctrine and how the Bush administration continually invokes it to sway judges to throw out court cases involving brazen and proven government wrongdoing…
Haha Jimmy; you should be more appreciative of your government; afterall don’t they provide you with everything you need. Good thing you didn’t call him the shrub. Ask a foreigner like Fidel Castro if US Presidents kill foreigners.
We are so lucky Bush is president (and so are Haliburton and KBR).
The press has close ties with the right wing and the CIA (OperationMockingbird)
Those kinds of comments are fun to read.
I had an opportunity to read a handful of comments directed at atheists. They were hilarious (communist atheist bastards) and true; too many atheists are socialists.
Hornberger posted a handful of hatemail directed at him – was excellent. The hatemail is the best reading. Thanks for posting them.
Government is our worst enemy; worse than any thug, mugger, rapist, vicious animal, drug dealer, terrorist or murderer. Make government your servant, not your master.
I learned that stuff from libertarians.
They talk that way for our freedom. Freedom is not free. Some Americans can’t afford it anymore; it’s becoming scarce too.
I learned that from right wingers and fearmongers.
But the Left doesn’t want us to be free at all.
🙂
“You’re like the spoiled brat who has all the comforts of life, yet hates the parents who provide it for him.”
Sounds like Bob Weir might as well had quoted the Colonel from the movie A Few Good Men: “A man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of freedom I provide and then questions the manner in which I provide it.”
I guess I won’t be inviting any of these editors to join my chapter of the He-Man Freedom Haters Club. We’re just a bunch of unappreciative guys that hang out and see who can be the first to blame America, but these editors would probably get pissed when we criticize Bush for keeping us safe.
These guys are ruining it for traitors like us who only want to trash Bush while we watch Osama videos and burn flags.
Anyway, I’ve got to go cuss out my dad now because the crappy Cadillac he bought me doesn’t even have leather seats. What an asshole.
Wait a minute here. Bob Weir is the guitar player from the Grateful Dead. I never liked that band because they played and sang out of tune. Plus they did lame covers of good blues songs.
This guy is fried from bad acid and he should shut down his little underground newspaper and get a real job or go move back in with his parents.
I don’t have any opinion on whether the dude should move back with his parents.
But the Grateful Dead did have some good songs.
I find that setting the Windows Media Player to continually repeat “Friend of the Devil” helps my concentration when I am writing about Bush’s idealism.
…Just some more standard, reactionary neo-Con shit that passes for Journalism. Such second hand, puerile accusations of living with your Mother as rebuttal along with subjective judgements of ‘whining’ and ingratitude equaling a threat to National Security, speaks to a low level of intellect or a chickenshit attempt at embarrassment; whichever you prefer…It’s hack Journalism at its best.
…Consider the source
Mullah Bovard,
I knew it, the blue eyes always threw me but now we knowst that you is a Bearded Crypto Mullah who has abraded his pate through fevered secret sessions with a turban, dervishing about your flat in a Beer Rapture whilst reading Suffi Love Poems and envisioning for yourself the reward virgins that shall be granted for tearing down this great nation. And here all I thought you was interested in was the sanctity of the Constitution and the properly functioning of the Separation of Powers. Now we know the truth, courtesy of that great effervescent font of truth known as the Brain Free Press….oh excuse me, I hit some wrong keys as I was mortifying the flesh….I meant to say “Free Press”.
It’s a chicken and egg question, who passed go and reached dumb first, the public or the press? Whatever the case may be, this public has a press and government it deserves, in spades.
One wonders if Polish Jokes shall be replaced by American Jokes in the short fullness of time.
Sincerely, Mullah Dick
…Generaly speaking, I don’t why the powers that be expect the more informed members of a nominal Democracy, to sit by and allow The State to edge closer and closer to the commencing actions of a needless Nuclear Disaster.
Dirk, if the public has the press it deserves, then why do people still read the Washington Post?
The blue eyes have proven a useful decoy many times over the years.
It has come to my attention that many of these hostile editors may have you confused with Blind Sheik al-Bovard. This guy was a piano player who penned a few hits in the 70’s (Rock The Cash Bar, Sheik Ya Booty, and the classic Mini-Burka, No Panties) and is now trying to establish a global caliphate from his base in Freedonia.
…Such Editors; and I use that term loosely. Don’t impress me as very difficult to confuse.
Tom… that is a triple hoot.
Surprised the Arab sheik used the same bed sheet I did for the self-portrait.
“Mini-Burka, No Panties”? Dang, I missed some fun. That sounds like more entertaining than spending the 70s baling hay, working for the State Highway Department, and lazing on work-study.
…just saw the photo of the infamous blind Sheik Al-Bovard. While we cannot in good conscience wish that peace and blessings be upon him. We should consider that before he became the devoted, Islamo-Fascist traitor we know him as today, he gave the world not only the formentioned music, but also the unforgettable “Midnight and Camel [ ] at the Oasis…and the classic “Ahab The A-rab.”
Of all the comments by those rejecting editors, not one actually addressed the underlying theme of your op-ed: should presidents be tried and punished for their war crimes? Or, once elected president, do we give them a license to kill with impunity? Of course, those readers here say no, but it would appear that readers elsewhere view the president more as a king (small ‘k’). Me? I think of Bush, et. al. as more of a soft-dictatorship.
Beloved Blind Sheik al Bovard,
The reason people read the Washington Post is the same reason they read the New Yawk Times, they confuse a weighty recitation of conventional wisdom with the now extinct art of journalism. This has many causes, some obvious, some mysterious and some simply quixotic but one can chart the decline of real journalism and independent thought and it will be a reverse image of the rising arc of so called “lifestyle” reporting. When the Pentagon Papers were published by little Arty Schulzberger’s pappy, there was a Draft but no “Eating”….”Real Estate”….. “Science by Numbers”…..or “Modern Necrophillia” sections in the Times. If you doubt the necrophillia assertion, jest check out the undead in the glossy “Fashion ” magazines that slide out of the morasse of lifestyle boosterism that passes for journalism @ the Times today.
The only good reason to read the Times is to choke down a bit of the cheerfully windy and one size fits all sophistry emitted by David Brooks in order to confirm that you are alive because of the sputtering eructations splattering the paper as you scare small dogs, grandmothers and children within earshot.
If they had to write on a gawd damned typewriter after several stiff cocktails at the local tavern (as opposed to regurgitating , verbatum, whatever is told them by their precious sources), they might publish something of worth but then, that assumes that the public, lost down the rathole of jingoistic gullibility and Television ebonics might actually understand complex investigative reporting instead of running from it like a feral dog in favor of a sweet little ditty on the return of Bowler Hats among the social set.
Bitter?…nah, I find the fact to be howlingly funny, in the relieving way a joke at a funeral always is.
By the way, the boys down at the local Madrassah are taking bets as to whether or not that turban you are wearing in the photo is a dishtowel, a diaper or somebody’s emptied first aid kit. Still though, it is the thought that counts and covering one’s head in the presence of He Who Shall Be Un Named is noted in the house.
Mullah Dick
…Jimm al Abdul Shaka al Bovard, formerly Sheik of the Burning Sands. Now Sheik of The DC Beltway.