Lack of Progress, LTTE's responding to Hartfod Courant

[Larkspur]

http://www.ctnow.com/news/local/northeast/hc-letters1219.artdec19,1,301492.story?coll=hc-headlines-northeast

There were 3 LTTE's published in response to Courant publisher's Dec. 5 article chiding Howard Dean for holding the Press to be accountable for spreading or helping to spread lies and distortions. Two of the 3 LTTE's were for Dean's view. Mine is the last of the 3. Enjoy!

Here's mine
Mr. Jack Davis said that he was "astounded that a major American political figure would so angrily give away one of the major achievements of the American Revolution - escaping the repressive British common law libel system," and that "Dean's audience at the Bushnell applauded it."

If Mr. Davis was so astounded by Howard Dean's provocative statement that American libel law and the press aren't protecting the truth and that the former governor would consider a more regressive libel policy toward the press, why didn't Mr. Davis interview Dean about it? Why didn't Mr. Davis interview the attendees at Dean's event to ask them why they, who Mr. Davis calls progressives, applaud stronger reins on what Rush Limbaugh calls the "liberal media?"

As a person who has had provocative letters and op eds published in The Courant, did it ever occur to Mr. Davis that the purpose of provocative speech is to get people to think outside the ruts they've burrowed into their brains?

Mr. Davis is amazed that progressives would applaud Dean's regressive libel-law idea. The first key to understanding this Dean-supporter behavior lies in the answer to why so many people, progressives included, supported the centrist Dean during his bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination and still support his vision today.

Thanks to the media playing his Iowa rally-the-volunteers speech as a "Scream" speech over 600 times, a Democratic-funded 527 group that used an ad morphing Dean into Osama bin Laden and other dirty tricks, as well as some internal Dean campaign problems, Dean failed to win the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. But Dean is not a defeated person. Unlike his former competitors, including the progressive Dennis Kucinich, Dean's presidential campaign was not called "Howard Dean for President." It was called "Howard Dean for America."

What Mr. Davis fails to understand is that unlike the Joemomentum Liebermans of the Democratic Party, Dean not only was willing to take the flak for proudly promoting those core progressive and Democratic principals, he also was willing to throw punches where they needed to land - whether it be on Republicans, "Bush-lite" Democrats, or the media. In contrast, Joe Lieberman would rather preen himself on the conservative Bill O'Reilly show and milk the few drops of attention O'Reilly's rabid neo-conservative audience is willing to give him, than tackle the "Pirates on the Potomac," whose policies are, as George Akerlof, the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics winner, says "a form of looting" of the federal treasury.

The Joemomentum strategy of the Democratic Party will condemn it at best to perpetual minority party status and at worst to a national joke, while allowing the Republican robber barons to drown the federal government in red ink. Maybe that is what the owners of pro-Republican Tribune Company, which owns The Courant, want. I was born in Chicago and raised 60 miles south of it, so I am quite familiar with the right-leaning Chicago Tribune paper.

[Cheswick2.0]

1. excellent letter

I loved your point about the ruts people have burrowed into their brains.