Opinion: Top 10 opinion items of last week
This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links. See About archive blog posts.
As measured by visits to the website, between Aug. 24-30 (with the measurement stopping on Friday morning):
1) Bush’s next invasion: Vietnam?, by Rosa Brooks.
2) Get government out of the bathroom, by Nick Gillespie.
3) Our (not so) private Idahos, by David Ehrenstein.
4) Obama’s right on Cuba, Editorial.
5) California without a Mexican, by Tamar Jacoby.
6) A not-so-secret mission, by David Wise.
7) College credit that fails students, by Alan Collinge.
8) It was always all about Al, by Jonah Goldberg.
9) Vietnam’s real lessons, by Andrew J. Bacevich.
10) Letters to the editor.
What were they saying about our chart-topper, Rosa Brooks’ modest proposal for President Bush to follow the logic of his rhetoric and reinvade Vietnam?
I was wondering on which side of Bush’s Vietnam analogy that the media would come down on. Turns out that facts and history do trump propaganda. I can only think that Bush is not familiar with history so when his speech writer went over the Vietnam parts Bush probably thought it was all true and a brilliant point to make. Either that or Bush and his writers think Americans are so dumb and uneducated that they’ll believe anything.
Rosa Brooks is back, and in great form. Her column in today’s Los Angeles Times would make Molly Ivins proud. [...] I’m thinking of emailing the entire column to every member of the California delegation, just in case any of them were impressed by Mr. Bush’s erudite speech yesterday.
Rosa ‘Luxemburg’ Brooks, lefty law professor somewhere and weekly columnist for the rapidly sinking L.A. Times, is usually unreadable and silly, but today she was spectacularly so.
[T]here’s a little problem there, Rosa: many argued, and many would argue to this day, that Vietnam was a deeply necessary war--and there will always be someone to make that argument in almost any instance. So ‘don’t fight needless wars’ would seem to be relative to the point of meaninglessness.
Rural Nevada Democratic Caucus Blog:
Brooks sees the fractured logic that the unfettered by knowledge, Bush brain produces. What really scares me is that ignorant people take what he says at face value. I charitably call those people staunch Republicans.
Last week’s Top 10 list here.