Richmond editorial.

This piece of cheap, ignorant, pro-Bush propaganda had me steaming today. Here's the text of my reply: In your scathing February 19th editorial, you allege that Clark “added nothing to the race.” How remarkably ignorant. Ignorant of the facts – the political reality that existed on September 17, 2003 when Wes Clark officially announced his candidacy. You may recall that, at that time, Howard Dean was not only the frontrunner in the race for the Democratic nomination, he was the presumptive nominee! At that time, John Edwards was not polling big numbers, and John Kerry’s campaign had all but been written off. The time seemed ripe for an anti-Dean to emerge. That anti-Dean was Wes Clark. Dean has no foreign policy or military experience. Clark has both. Dean had an angry core constituency that was uniformly in opposition to the Iraq war and little else – it was the vanguard of angry liberalism. Clark offered not only hope, but a rational alternative to Bush’s neoconservative permanent war. Unlike Bush and the neoconservative clique around him, Wes Clark actually fought in wars. He was the commanding officer of a successful one in 1999. He knew the reality of war, and the sacrifice that soldiers make to fight it. People like Bush, Cheney, Perle, Wolfowitz, and Rice neither know nor, evidently, care. Throughout the Clark campaign, certain fringe-right commentators and media, (apparently bereft of any available, substantive criticism), simply took to calling Retired Four-Star United States Army General Wesley K. Clark a “high-strung loon”, or crazy. Or creepy. In a sorry attempt at sarcasm and/or humor, you state that General Clark took “approximately 352 positions on the Iraq war”. No, he didn’t. Apparently, a nuanced and though-out opinion on the difficulties in dealing with Iraq are too difficult for you to comprehend. Indeed, the “controversy” over Clark’s positions on Iraq only existed in the minds of people who can only see matters in black and white. A more complicated and sophisticated analysis, as set forth by General Clark, never made it you’re your ignorance. (For the record, Clark said that he would have voted for a resolution that required Bush to obtain Security Council authorization and UN assistance for any military campaign against Iraq. Since that didn’t happen, Clark would not have voted for the “blank check” resolution that ultimately passed. I find it fascinating that Bush and his surrogates now routinely allege, in essence, what were we to do? They now say, openly and without irony, that Hussein had forbidden UN weapons inspectors from entering Iraq. As if Hans Blix never existed.) You throw around an accusation that Clark spoke of “bizarre fantasies and conspiracies.” Name one. It must be fun to make wild accusations against someone without any proof of same. Perhaps Clark’s “statements just didn’t make any sense” to your ignorant mind. You then turn to Bob Dole’s insult of General Clark, the response to which also went straight over your head. Bob Dole, in commenting on Wes Clark’s third-place showing in New Hampshire (ahead of John Edwards), told Clark that he had been politically demoted to Colonel. Interesting how that fact gets left out of every hit-piece written against Clark and his handling of that awkward situation. It wasn’t Clark’s alleged surliness or craziness that ended his candidacy. In the end, it was sheer ignorance, such as yours, and an across-the-board media blackout, that touted John Edwards’ fourth-place finish in NH over Clark’s third-place; touted Edwards’ “momentum” in finishing third or fourth in AZ, ND, NM, and OK over Clark’s second and first place finishes there. I never thought that a daily newspaper such as yours would consciously be victim to, and perpetuate the dumbing-down of America. I suppose, in your view, if so much as one person believes your cheap, insulting and obnoxious propaganda, your work is complete. You should be ashamed of yourselves. But shame is out of style in the midst of today’s selfish, “conservative” hedonism.