The President Who Does Not Feel???

[sleuth]

Anyone with more time and patience than I do want to draft up a response for this? From my email (I can't believe someone had the nerve to send this to me. )

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Subject: FW: This is a piece written by novelist E.L. Doctorow.
September 9, 2004, "The Easthampton Star"
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I fault this president for not knowing what death is. He does not suffer the death of our twenty one year olds who wanted to be what they could be. On the eve of D-day in 1944 General Eisenhower prayed to God for the lives of the young soldiers he knew were going to die. He knew what death was. Even in a justifiable war, a war not of choice but of necessity, a war of survival, the cost was almost more than Eisenhower could bear.

But this president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for
it. You see him joking TN s and the inconsolable remembrance of aborted life.... they come to his desk as a political liability which is why the press is not permitted to photograph the arrival of their coffins from Iraq. How then can he mourn? To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing. He does not regret that his reason for going to war was, as he knew, unsubstantiated by the facts. He does not regret that his bungled plan for the war's aftermath has made of his mission-accomplished a disaster. He does not regret that rather than controlling terrorism his war in Iraq has licensed it.

So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice. He wanted to go to war and he did. He had not the mind to perceive the costs of war, or to listen to those who knew those costs. He did not understand that you do not go to war when it is one of the options but when it is the only option; you go not because you want to but because you have to. Yet this president knew it would be difficult for Americans not to cheer the overthrow of a foreign dictator. He knew that much. This president and his supporters would seem to have a mind for only one thing -to take power, to remain in power, and to use that power for the sake of themselves and their friends. A war will do that as well as anything.

You become a wartime leader. The country gets behind you. Dissent becomes
inappropriate. And so he does not drop to his knees, he is not contrite, he does not sit in the church with the grieving parents and wives and children. He is the President who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the thirty five million of us who live in poverty, he does not feel for the forty percent who cannot afford health insurance, he does not feel for the miners whose lungs are turning black or for the
working people he has deprived of the chance to work overtime at time-and-a-half to pay their bills --- it is amazing for how many people in this country this President does not feel. But he will dissemble feeling. He will say in all sincerity he is relieving the wealthiest one percent of the population of their tax burden for the sake of the rest of us, and that he is polluting the air we bTN hat America was ceding its role as the last best hope of mankind. It was their perception that the classic archetype of democracy was morphing into a rogue nation. The greatest democratic republic in history was turning its back on the future, using its extraordinary power and standing not to advance the ideal of a concordance of civilizations but to endorse the kind of tribal combat that originated with the Neanderthals, a people, now extinct, who could imagine ensuring their survival by no other means than pre-emptive war. The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses. The people he appoints are cast in his image. The trouble they get into and get us into, TN

Finally, the media amplify his character into our moral weather report. He becomes the face of our sky, the conditions that prevail: How can we sustain ourselves as the United States of America given the stupid and ineffective warmaking, the constitutionally insensitive lawgiving, and the monarchal economics of this president? He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves.

E.L. Doctorow

[Gooseneck]

Originally Posted by sleuth

Anyone with more time and patience than I do want to draft up a response for this?

Sorry, I couldn't get past the first paragraph.

[Tonio]

During the debate, didn't Bush say something about a woman whose husband was killed in Iraq, saying it was "hard work to love her as best I can"?

[2ndAmendment]

Originally Posted by Tonio

During the debate, didn't Bush say something about a woman whose husband was killed in Iraq, saying it was "hard work to love her as best I can"?

More distortions?

[SamSpade]

Funny .... but if you remove the reference to Iraq and Eisenhower, and tell someone it was written about Lincoln - or McKinley - or Wilson - or Roosevelt - or Truman - or Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon - or Clinton - and you know, SOMEONE probably said the same things.

And it's all stupid. Because not one shred of it is objective. An entire article devoted to how a man doesn't *feel* and doesn't *care*. How do they know all this? Every bit of it is sheer conjecture on the part of a person who clearly doesn't like the guy. It reads like a teenager who hates the head cheerleader or the football captain - not punctuated by anecdotes or facts, but unsubstantiated opinion. I might as well write it about anyone.

[SamSpade]

Originally Posted by Tonio

During the debate, didn't Bush say something about a woman whose husband was killed in Iraq, saying it was "hard work to love her as best I can"?

Context is important.

"You know, I think about Missy Johnson. She's a fantastic lady I met in Charlotte, North Carolina. She and her son Bryan, they came to see me. Her husband PJ got killed. He'd been in Afghanistan, went to Iraq. You know, it's hard work to try to love her as best as I can, knowing full well that the decision I made caused her loved one to be in harm's way. "

This *IS* a man who feels the burden of the deaths in Iraq.

I think the man who wrote that article is projecting.

[Tonio]

You're right about context, SamSpade. It helps make what Bush said much more reasonable. Still, I wouldn't have said "try to love her" if I were Bush, because it might be seen as inappropriate. I might have said "try to comfort her."

[T.Rally]

The last sentence from the Barnes and Noble bio sums up Mr Doctorow. He is just another in a long list of people who have confused fame for wisdom.

"Few writers have succeeded as E. L. Doctorow has at creating stories (largely based in 1930s New York) that evoke both warm, personal memory and a grander national portrait. Doctorow doesn't always promise historical veracity, but he captures our imagination of the past flawlessly."

[2ndAmendment]

Originally Posted by Tonio

You're right about context, SamSpade. It helps make what Bush said much more reasonable. Still, I wouldn't have said "try to love her" if I were Bush, because it might be seen as inappropriate. I might have said "try to comfort her."

He was not being PC. He is a Christian. I, as a Christian, express love for those in need whether it is spiritual, emotional, or physical. I believe he was expressing the same kind of love. It is called Agape love or unconditional, fatherly love.

[FromTexas]

I didn't know you meant it platonically. Ignore the three dozen red roses I sent you. Just pretend they were for Sharon.