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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (38572)	8/18/2002 10:27:51 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 281500

Oh, Rorty does have his axes to grind. One of the reasons those quotes are so good is that it underlines the degree to which boxes don't reflect views, that is, the pomo box, of which Rorty is a self confessed member, doesn't mean he agrees with everyone someone else puts in the box. In fact, in that quote--looks as if it might also have been taken from the Achieving Our Country book--he's quite hard on the pomos who can't write or speak english. And, since his own colleagues in philosophy have given up on him, he'a also hard on them. Not unlike most very brilliant generalists, the specialists don't like him. He doesn't like the academic left; much prefers the left wing of the democratic party. Says, on several occasions, he's gone from being a Trotskyite to a Humphreyite.

To: LindyBill who wrote (38572)	8/19/2002 1:01:40 AM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 281500

Mickey Kaus notices a distinction I had missed. From Slate Kausfiles: Doesn't today's NYT scoop -- revealing that U.S. advisers secretly helped Saddam Hussein more than we'd known in Iraq's 1981-88 war with Iran -- rather aggressively hide the difference between Iraq's use of chemical weapons against Iran's military, which arguably we knew about and then somewhat hypocritically condemned, and Iraq's gassing of civilians (its own civilians) at Halabja, which there's no evidence we knew about. While national security adviser Condoleezza Rice mentioned both sorts of chemical attacks as grounds for pursuing "regime change" in Iraq, the civilian attacks would seem to be the more important part of that case. By lumping both uses together as "Iraq's use of gas" or "use of chemical weapons," the NYT's Patrick Tyler manages to obscure this distinction until a brief mention in the 17th graf -- thereby giving the impression that his story has undermined more of the case for "regime change" than it really has. ... Fence-straddling disclaimer: I'm not necessarily in favor of attacking Iraq. But I'm against the NYT distorting a story as part of what looks to almost everyone (not just kf) like a coordinated anti-war campaign. ... The American people need both the convenient and the inconvenient truths about Iraq from their newspapers, but it turns out there are powerful forces standing in their way!