PUTNEY-I'm wondering why Kamala Harris - right after Donald Trump rose from the stage in Butler, Pennsylvania, fist in the air, urging "Fight, fight, fight" - chose to adopt that pugilistic language herself. Watching her campaign, I felt that while criticizing Trump incessantly, she also chose to take on and copy his worst habits. Like name calling, at the end.
When everything is characterized as a fight, a me-versus-you, an us-versus-them dynamic is immediately set up. There is an instant declaration that the other side has no value, no thoughts or questions worth considering, no possibly logical or reasonable points of view worth listening to.
A declaration is made that the other side must be squashed and vanquished - not worked with. Why does our so-called democratic republic have to be engaged in a never-ending civil war?
I consider myself to be left leaning. The most bigoted people I have known in my life have been left-leaning Democrats. I have known many people over the course of my lifetime who have tolerated zero questioning of the party line and who have kicked me out of their lives the minute I asked a valid question about a political narrative or if I said something like "You know, I've got about 10 books on my shelves that say the opposite."...
PUTNEY-Well, thank goodness that Joe Biden withdrew from the race for president (although no one wanted Kamala Harris when she previously ran for the office). But one way to avoid another race like this again is to mandate a retirement age for politicians. That's a very easy way to...
PUTNEY-Joe Biden, the nation's top law enforcer, is breaking the Leahy Laws. According to the Washington Post: "The United States has quietly approved and delivered more than 100 separate foreign military sales to Israel since the Gaza war began Oct. 7, amounting to thousands of precision-guided munitions, small-diameter bombs,
Some of the things I don't understand these days: • How Donald Trump could possibly get insurance deals by inflating the value of his properties. It has always been my experience that the more something was worth, the more it cost to insure it. Do the wealthy get insurance deals? • Why a member of the South Carolina National Guard (Nikki Haley's husband) should be deployed to Africa. What are we cooking up in Africa now? Another Libya? Or has...
The writer adds: "I'd like it to be known that in submitting this letter for publication consideration, I appended 12 references to it." I want to make it clear at the outset that war and violence of any sort horrify me. For the U.S., I believe war is merely everyday business. We have a voracious and rapacious military-industrial complex (MIC) that requires constant care and feeding. I don't think our government in Washington cares where death and destruction take place,
I was shocked to read Liam Madden's letter. I was shocked that VTDigger chose to exclude him from the recent debate that they hosted between candidates for Vermont's seat in the U.S. Congress, and that no one involved with the debate would talk to him about it. I am very anti-war, so veterans don't earn any extra points with me. And I think the whole climate change conversation is bonkers, characterized by a lot of the same kind of highly...
I would like to start a wide-spread conversation about how we elect our president. I think our political system has become ludicrous. We elect a president for four years, but two years in, we start the whole campaign process all over, distracting ourselves from lots of other things going on on the planet for half of our time - if we happen to be paying attention. It's a huge circus, and unfortunately, I think we should all be asking whether...
It's been amazing to watch how rigged and undemocratic the presidential debates have been. I was surprised to finally see CNN allow anyone else to speak besides Joe Biden and Kamala Harris in the last debate. And the NBC debates could not have been a more blatant demonstration of censorship, with lesser-known candidates relegated to the edges of the stage and given almost no questions, so that they were forced to yell and interrupt in order to have just a...